A pile of aluminum tubing, a binder of designs on paper, an empty room — and a wild idea.
That’s all there was on Day One, back in 2017, when ‘Iolani School teacher Martin Emde corralled five students to propose that they work together to design and construct an experimental manned electric aircraft.
“I remember that day so vividly,” says Mariko Storey-Matsutani, who at the time was just an untested ninth grader. “I had no experience. I really had no idea what this project would turn into.”
What it did turn into was three years of extracurricular work, stress and countless extended school days and weekends (not counting time in the COVID-19 pandemic when students on the project team couldn’t work on the plane in person). Over the years an ever-changing roster of about 20 students in all have designed, cut, drilled, welded, sewed, programmed, assembled, failed and tried again, and failed and tried yet again, in pursuit of getting their vision into the air.
The result: Today a massive, gleaming motor glider aircraft dubbed the E-Hawk is fully built, FAA-certified and waiting inside the third-floor workshop of ‘Iolani’s Sullivan Center for Innovation and Leadership as its devoted young builders are itching to see it take its first test flight. ‘Iolani officials say they can’t be sure, but think it might be the first FAA-approved, manned aircraft built by a Hawaii K-12 school.
Almost entirely designed, fabricated and assembled by students, the single-seat E-Hawk sprawls across the work floor with a 37-foot wingspan and 19-1/2-foot length, weighing about 385 pounds with its student-built 120V battery installed. They think it is capable of flying for about 30 minutes, with a cruising speed of 40 mph.
The E-Hawk “represents a trailblazing first step in the advancement of sustainable air travel that exposed its student builders to engineering, aviation and project management disciplines,” says a school announcement of the unveiling. “The E-Hawk team’s ultimate goal is piloting the aircraft on flights within the Hawaiian Islands using only renewable energy to power it.”
Once the project secures hangar space, Emde said, the E-Hawk will be taken apart, transported and reassembled for its first test flights at Kawaihapai Airfield, also popularly known by its former name, Dillingham Airfield. A couple of experienced, licensed adult pilots have volunteered for the first flights; Emde recently got his license so he also could be an early pilot. The FAA has granted the E-Hawk a special airworthiness certificate to fly as an experimental amateur-built aircraft.
At an unveiling ceremony Thursday, five former student builders — all of whom have gone on to pursue STEM-related fields in college — smiled for photos as Head of School Timothy Cottrell praised former and current E-Hawk team members for taking on “authentic, messy, real-world problems and going through the process of trying to solve them.”
Emde, an engineer in ‘Iolani’s iDepartment and a former engineer on Boeing’s 777 aircraft program, said he conceived the project as way of helping students push the limits on what they were capable of doing. “More than anything, I’m super proud of the students who have worked on this,” he said.
The aircraft design began with open-source plans by Missouri-based Rainbow Aviation Services for an EMG-6 ultralight glider. The students, led by Emde, revised the design to accommodate a battery-powered engine for a propeller-mounted aft of the modified fuselage, and a dashboard system to inform the pilot about speed, altitude and power diagnostics.
Most of the aircraft’s structure, such as its fuselage, wings and flight controls, were fabricated and built by the students based on the EMG-6 plans. All of the E-Hawk’s electronics-related components — including battery modules, main power and digital instrument panels, instrumentation circuit boards, custom-designed 3D-printed parts and more — were designed and finished by the students. The complex process is documented on the project website, ehawk.iolani.org, and its social media channels.
Could this kind of transportation be used on a large scale? Could Hawaii one day regularly see electric gliders zipping between the islands? “Hawaii’s a really great proving ground for this type of experimental electric aircraft,” due to the short distances between islands and burgeoning alternate sources of energy, said Noah Taniguchi, a former E-Hawk team member who now studies mechanical engineering at Boston University.
Certainly, the E-Hawk project has been a launching pad for the students who built it.
Dylan Fujihara, another contributor to the E-Hawk since that fateful Day One, said at the ceremony that the project gave him “unparalleled” experience and skills and helped propel him toward his career path: He recently graduated from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University-Prescott and is pursuing a career in the airline industry.
Dylan Dinio recalls spending “hours upon hours upon hours just trying to figure out where something went wrong in the code” while helping to program the E-Hawk’s avionics system. That experience taught him how to document and persist in solving problems as he now studies computer science and game development at Northeastern University.
Storey-Matsutani, one of few females on the E-Hawk team, said the project taught her skills in engineering and fabrication, as well as such “soft skills” as leadership, teamwork, communication and problem solving. She’s now a Princeton University sophomore in mechanical and aerospace engineering.
She said her message to other girls considering the male-dominated STEM fields is to “advocate for yourself. It’s easy to be intimidated … but if it’s something you’re passionate about,” she says, gesturing with a broad smile to the E-Hawk towering behind her, “it can get you to a really incredible place.”
