While most AHS students were relaxing on Friday night, a group of students from the middle and high school were busy flying around the world.

On May 13th, the Aspen Aeronautic Program held its second annual Round the World Flight Challenge, where 41 aeronautics students were placed into two teams and spent 48 hours racing around the world in a Redbird Desktop flight simulator. Each student was required to fly at least two two-hour shifts. The AHS director of aeronautics, Greg Roark, oversaw the challenge and helped prepare the students for it.

“It’s a race, but by the same token the realism settings that we have set for this machine are real,” Roark said. “You can burn up an engine, you can overstress the aircraft.”

These students have spent the majority of the year taking ground school classes and spent countless hours practicing on different simulators. In addition they used Skyvector, a flight planning software, to plan their routes and determine the fastest way to make it around the world while accounting for weather, fuel and other variables.

“These are real world situations that American Airlines, Frontier, United go through,” Roark said. “With the big airlines they have team of people sitting in a room doing this exact thing. Factoring in weather, factoring in fuel prices, factoring in all these things that they do for their operations to be safe and efficient. This is what these kids get exposed to.”

On top of the planning, the students gained valuable knowledge of applied mathematics, science engineering, and many other life lessons.

“Virtually everything that you study in school we do here,” Roark said.

While much of the aeronautics program focuses on preparing students for future piloting, it also instills teamwork and leadership. Kat Kowar, one of the high school team captains, has seen many of these skills develop firsthand.

“My favorite part about the Round the World Flight Challenge is getting to see everything come together and having all the kids working on all the pieces and parts,” Kowar said. “In the ground school classes we do all the weight and balance calculations, we do planning and things like that, but in this it all comes together and everyone works as one team.”

Middle school team captain, Sloan Hamill, has also gained a lot from the aeronautics program.

“I would feel guilty if I didn’t [participate] because it it such a great program,” Hamill said.

Soon the two teams won’t just be competing against each other. Starting next year, Roark’s classes will be broadcasted live to many other schools, and two of the Redbird Jay Flight Simulators will be placed in Glenwood High School and Vista Ridge High School in Colorado Springs.