Purdue students help future of aviation

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. (WLFI) - Fixing military aircraft, planning for future flights, and helping out a local airport:  these are just some of the projects Purdue University students are working on.

Five students are working in a lab at the Purdue University Airport to one day help troops overseas.

"We do research for the United States Marines and developing repairs for the CH-53 Helicopter.  We try to do state of the art repairs for composite airplanes," said Associate Professor Ronald Sterkenburg.

Aviation Technology Associate Professor Ronald Sterkenburg said when a plane is in need of repair, the system they developed can fix it in one hour.

"If the people of Afghanistan are shooting holes at your airplane, you need to fix them, so you can fly again.  Otherwise a $50 million airplane sits on the ground.  We remove the part of the structure.  We plug it up with a titanium patch, glue it on there and then we put the fabric transferred here and the final product all the way to the right," said Sterkenburg.

Sterkenburg said the group has been working on the project for over two years.  Other Purdue students are working on a hangar of the future.  It deals with the maintenance side of airplanes.

"Maintenance crews have to be able to speak the same digital language that the aircraft is using," said Tim Ropp.

Student Brent Vlasman said because planes are more high tech now, the maintenance side has some catching up to do.

"We have the smarter aircraft so now we are bringing maintenance kind of up to pace so that a new aircraft with all this digital technology can download information to the hangar.  The hangar is right there with it on the same page, they can communicate flawlessly and reduce cost, increase tracking, safety, and reliability," said Vlasman.

In a different project students are working with the Delphi Municipal Airport.

"It allows us to go out and meet with stakeholders and really come up with solutions to problems they might have.  This year we met with Brian Sterm who also is the Director of Maintenance here.  He's also the Airport Manager over at Delphi Municipal Airport.  He asked us to come out to the airport and to listen to concerns the airport board had and hopefully work with them to help solve some of their problems," said John Speranza.

Ashley Noyes is involved in the same project, she said it's nice to get out of the classroom and get involved in real life situations.

"I am a pilot and I want to improve the Aviation community to make it cheaper, easier, anything I can do.  When I'm helping an airport solve a problem as far as some how needing to market their fuel to bring in more traffic, it's nice I was able to do that for them," said Noyes.