The Jet Airways hangar in Kalina buzzed with the excited chatter of 180 tribal teenagers on Saturday morning, as the children saw how the aviation theories they had studied in books worked in actual life.
The teenagers are Class X and XII students of a school run by the Shrimad Rajchandra Love and Care (SRLC) Foundation in Karajveri, Dharampur district, in Gujarat. They reached Mumbai on Saturday morning and were taken to the hangar in Kalina as part of a corporate social responsibility initiative of Jet Airways.
Jeeta Sheth, a volunteer at SRLC, said, “We decided to have this excursion for holistic development of the students. They are all from the science stream and will understand the functioning of the theory they study in class. They are visiting Mumbai for the first time. Many of them had never sat in a train before, and all of them are seeing an aircraft for the first time. They all come from 93 very remote villages in Gujarat.”
The students were given a brief history of the aviation industry, and their eyes lit up as they listened to the pilots and airline staff speak.
Kriyanshi Naik, a Class X student, said, “Everything that we saw in our books, we could see it and experience it here. The cockpit fascinated me the most. I also want to be a pilot one day.”
Jitesh Meral, a Class XII student, often borrows books on aircraft from the school library. “It is unreal to see them in real life. Learning about the various parts of an aircraft has only increased my inclination to pursue engineering.”
The students were divided into groups and taken through the mechanisms of the cockpit, the aerodynamic laws that help the aircraft fly, and the assembly of an aircraft.
Dhaval Mehta, coordinator SRLC, said, “This is an enriching experience for the students and will help widen their horizon. These children come from some of the most marginalised sections of society, and it is essential to take an integrated and interactive approach to maximise their potential and take them out of the cycle of ignorance and poverty.”
Belson Coutinho, senior vice-president of marketing at Jet Airways, said, “We are lucky that we have infrastructure like this and would like to give children an opportunity they will never get again. They visited every checkpoint of how an aircraft is maintained to finally an aircraft as a product, which will provide them an insight like never before.”
