VENTURA : Students See How Ideas Fly in Contest

The children chose bold names for their airplanes: Supersonic Spyplane, 391 Speedbird and Jetski III. Although these planes were made of flimsy white paper, their young pilots took them as seriously as the shuttles they hope to ride into outer space someday.

“I want to be an astronaut,” said Jesus Sanchez, 8. “I want to explore.”

Sanchez and about 14 other members of the Young Astronaut Program flew the paper planes in a contest Wednesday in the yard of the E.P. Foster Elementary School in Ventura.

The nationwide program for elementary and junior high school students promotes science, mathematics and space-related subjects. The effort is intended to help reverse the low proficiency levels of American students in these subjects, compared with children in other industrialized countries.

The students’ creations were judged by the school’s principal and two reading specialists on the planes’ distance, speed and fancy acrobatics. Using scissors and thin white paper, the students designed the planes, adding ridges and folds that enabled the aircraft to dip and glide in strange patterns. Paper clips mounted to the folds increased the planes’ speed.

Sanchez’s F-14 Tomcat, an intricately folded plane, earned him the title of overall winner and first place in the distance category and second place in acrobatics.

Sanchez’s peers also expressed an avid interest in aviation. Mario Pena, who placed third in distance, said he too wanted to go into space. “I’d like to see the planets,” he said.

Winning planes flew 20 to 30 feet, and some remained in the air for more than two minutes.

Teacher Catharine Byl began a chapter of the Young Astronauts Program at the school in February and has helped about 20 second- and third-grade students build model space shuttles, understand gravity and weightlessness and experiment with team-related projects.

“There’s a real need for kids today to improve in those areas,” she said, adding that aerospace and aviation will be among the major fields in the future as the technological revolution continues.

Byl has been active in the Eagle Flight Program, an organization that trains classroom teachers to instruct other teachers on methods to teach aerospace in the classroom.

Foster Principal Greg Kampf said he has never disciplined a student for flying paper airplanes in the classroom.