It’s Ok to Have Crazy Dreams — Lessons Learned from Fixing An Aircraft as an Amateur

This summer, I spent a good portion of my Saturdays fixing up an old Cessna 150 plane with an A&P mechanic and a team of people so that it can fly again. It’s one of the biggest projects I have done to date, and one step closer to my dream of building my own aircraft from scratch.

Photo taken at Beverly Regional Airport (BVY) in mid-August 2018 with the MIT Flying Club and the staff at BVY

Back story: I started to seriously pursue product design/industrial design/mechanical engineering in 2016 when I finally had access to machine shop tools. I have always loved working with my hands. When I was younger, I used to take everything I could get my hands on apart. As I got older, I started to tinker with more things other than electronics, including fixing cars, building houses with Habitat for Humanity, and building furniture using very, very manual hand tools (wood, screws, screwdrivers, and a manual saw). The first time I laid my hands on power tools and machineries such as mills and lathes in a machine shop in 2016, I thought I was in heaven. It wasn’t long before I got up to speed on most of the tools in the machine shop and decided to practice them on actual projects.

Me machining a flashlight on a lathe in fall 2017

Over the course of the last two years, I must have done over 60 different projects on the side, many of which failed miserably, but I had a lot of fun in the process and learned a ton through my mistakes.

Earlier this year, after building three instruments and a skateboard (photo below), one of my instructors, who became aware of my mildly increasing obsession with making randomly things with machine tools asked casually “your projects seem to be getting bigger and bigger. What are you going to build next? A boat?”

I didn’t have a good answer for him at the time, partially because I had another dozen half-finished projects already in the pipeline that I was excited to try out. But it did get me thinking about what bigger, crazier projects I wanted to work on. Seeing how I have always been fascinated with cars, motorcycles, and planes, and was hoping to complete my collection of the three types of licenses within the next year or two, the thought of building a plane came to mind, followed immediately by the thought of “I must have lost my mind”, then a sense of excitement, then a frenzy of Googling. The human race is wonderful and fascinating. Whatever crazy idea you have, there are usually a few dozen others out there that make your crazy idea look tame. This was no exception, I soon found YouTube videos of others making homemade planes, and not dying from flying them. I then returned back to my instructor, the one that once responded “of course, why would you do anything normal?” when I told him what I was doing as side projects over winter break (creating holograms from lasers, cloning 3D objects using resin, among other things), and asked for advice on how to build a plane. He quickly referred me to the Experimental Aircraft Association, where I found people all across the country that have built planes before. Turns out, I haven’t lost my mind after all. My instructor did warn me that a project like this requires a farm and about 10 years of time, and that although my dorm room is big enough to fit my guitars and skateboard projects, it certainly won’t be big enough to fit a plane. But I was too excited to see the illogical part of all this, especially after finding out that this project is actually feasible!

Now, for someone with zero experience in building a plane, I recruited the help of my friend Dave from the MIT Media Lab, who is currently training for his pilot license, and the two of us set out on a journey to find out as much as we can about how to build a plane. We decided that it would probably make sense to learn to fix a plane first to understand the innerworkings of a plane before building one from scratch (or a kit). By chance, right around when we started searching for a plane to fix, an alum was trying to donate a plane to MIT’s flying club, and the plane needs a lot of fixing up as it hasn’t been used in almost a decade and wasn’t in flyable condition. We eagerly jumped onboard, along with a few other students from the flying club and a few pilots/staff from the airport.

The plane back in June 2018 before we started fixing it. Note the lack of wings, parts of the tail, and (not pictured) a wasp nest inside the engine

So here are some things I learned from fixing the plane.

1. It’s ok to have crazy dreams — If I had shot down my own idea before I got a chance to even explore it, I would never have had such amazing opportunities to work on this project.
2. But back your crazy dreams with baby steps — I started with woodworking over the years via building houses, furniture, an ukulele, then guitar, then bass, and a skateboard, then more recently metal work via machining a flashlight, a remote controlled race car, and then fixing a plane before working on building an actual plane. I also tinkered with/fixed cars growing up. Each project gave me more confidence and skillsets that proved to be valuable to this project.
3. But also be daring enough to just jump in — I knew nothing about planes coming in. It was intimidating to work with retired pilots that have flown, built, and fixed planes for decades. But one thing I learned since I got to MIT is that it’s better to ask questions and be willing to learn than to remain an idiot and pretend that you are smart, only for people to find out the hard way that you are not. I came in bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, into a whole new world that was filled with excitement and possibilities. I also gained a whole new level of respect for pilots. For example, did you know that it’s harder to fly on a rainy day (you can’t see ahead without instruments) than at night (where you can see further ahead than during the day sometimes) or when it snows (where you can see below pretty well)? Or that you can usually land a plane safely after the engine explodes or dies in midair? Or that the paint job of the plane actually affects the way it flies?
4. Find people crazy enough to support your dreams — One thing I love about MIT is the culture. Moving here two years ago was the first time when my crazy ideas were not only not shot down but encouraged. Having support for my crazy ideas has been tremendously helpful in finding the resources needed to turn these ideas into possible realities.
5. Find people that will do it with you — I honestly don’t know what I would have done if I didn’t have my teams that allowed my startups to come to life, and many other crazy ideas I had, including my thesis, took multiple professors (five so far, to be precise), multiple labs, across two universities (MIT and Harvard) to transform what seemed like science fiction into science. This plane project is no exception. I also learned that though there is no I in team, I was also an important part of the team. For example, I learned that my hands are the only ones small enough to fit into the gap between the wings and the body of the plane to attach and tighten the wings to the plane, and torque it using the precise range of force to ensure the wings don’t fall off the plane in midair (a seemingly important step).
6. Things are often only as hard as your imagination makes it out to be — before fixing this aircraft, I was imagining that I’d need a graduate degree in aeronautical engineering in order to have enough background to work on a project like this. But I was more of the type of gal to play basketball than to read a book about basketball. Jumping into the deep-end in hands-on knowledge was the most preferable way for me to learn. I was surprised to quickly realize how similar a small aircraft was to that of a car in components and the basic concepts for how it works. Had I dismissed the idea out of fear of how hard it would have been, I would have missed out on a great opportunity. Perhaps it’s my engineering mindset, perhaps it’s my naive nature, but I love problems, and I tend to run towards the problem rather than away from it. In fact, I wished the aircraft was a little more broken and worn down so that I could learn even more about how it works. A few times during the repair process, I was tempted to take a sledge hammer and destroy parts of it just so that I could learn how to repair it some more.
7. Stay stubborn and strong willed — I’m not known for taking no for an answer. As a kid, if I didn’t get my way, I would scream at the top of my lungs for hours on end until I either got my way or passed out from exhaustion. Now, that technique obviously doesn’t work anymore, but what that translated into is this relentless energy towards problem solving. This unwillingness to give up when things get hard. Some people call this grit. I call it stubbornness. But whatever you call it, once I have a dream, I am stubborn enough that I have to see the dream through. This has been tremendously helpful in accomplishing my goals over the years, and this is no exception. Which leads to my next point.
8. People will drop out. Keep going anyway. Dreams only die when you give up on them, not when people give up on you — People are busy, many have ten million opportunities that look attractive and they shop around. But don’t let that discourage you. There’s a world of difference between someone who is doing something because it is their dream and passion vs. something that they see as optional/nice to have. If it is your dream/passion, you will find a way, if not, you will find an excuse. It would be nice to find people who share the same dreams as you, but if not, keep going anyway.
9. I don’t ever regret the risks I have taken, I only regret the ones that I didn’t take— If you asked me what my most proud projects to date are, I would point you to the guitars, skateboard, and plane project above. Each represented a risk I took and the many hurdles I came along the way to significantly better myself. In fact, even the failed projects taught me a significant amount, sometimes even more so than the projects that succeeded. But if you were to ask me what my biggest regrets are, I would point you to the eight years I spent as an electrical engineer, “stuck” at a job that I wasn’t happy in but afraid of quitting and doing something else and failing (quitting my job and moving to Boston to begin a new life in 2016 was the best decision I have ever made). I would also point you to many past projects such as the liftavator, a crazy idea I had that everyone laughed at years ago that I never ended up pursuing, only for Verizon to take a modified version of the idea and have it go viral. There’s no use in crying over spilled milk, but you can learn from them and change future outcomes. Bottom line: take more risks
10. Build even bigger dreams — Don’t settle, don’t be complacent. Dream bigger. After all, people like Elon Musk, as crazy as they are, are successful because they dare to dream.

And, if things don’t go according to plan, that’s ok! That’s part of what makes life exciting!

Next up, our journey in building our own plane! It’s finally happening! Stay tuned! No dream is too big!