A team of students from Dene Magna School, including several from the Lea, near Ross-on-Wye, have taken a giant leap forward in experiencing flight as they are looking forward to building their own flight simulator.

The school in Mitcheldean, is one of two schools that have scooped £5,000 to build a fully-operational flight simulator after winning a fiercely-fought national schools competition organised by the Royal Aeronautical Society, in partnership with leading airline manufacturer Boeing.

Nine schools from across the country reached the finals of The Falcon Initiative, held at the Imperial War Museum Duxford on Saturday, June 4th. Pupils presented their teams’ experiences of involvement in the competition and the benefits that participation has brought to their individual schools to a panel of aerospace industry judges.

The competition’s judges assessed the schools’ flight simulator prototypes before the finals. This made up the other half of the total marks available for their presentations.

Dene Magna School, was praised for their innovative design of a simulator and the fact that a technically challenging project, involving excellent research, had been carried out by a very young team.

Dene Magna School teacher Heath Adams said that this will only further their team’s “determination and motivation to carry on and lead to a successful final simulator build.”

The team from Dene Magna will go on to build their flight simulator by 2017.

The Falcon Initiative is an innovative project that gives 13 -18 year-old pupils the chance to get involved in a practical, fun and educationally-relevant engineering business project which is related directly to the National Curriculum.

As a consequence, the Royal Aeronautical Society and Boeing hope that the experience will inspire pupils to pursue the further study of Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths (STEM) subjects.

Commenting on the winning designs, Jenny Body OBE FRAeS, Past President of the Royal Aeronautical Society, current Chair of its Education and Skills Committee and one of the competition judges, said: “It was inspirational to see the future generations of aerospace engineers providing a stunning calibre of presentations at this event.

“All of the judges, including myself, were blown away by all the simulator entries, however we felt the two winners just had an extra special quality.”