Photo by Stacey Montebello
The plane picks up speed, but not nearly enough to get off the ground. Alerts flash on the cockpit screen: Nose too low! Pull back on the controls! Just in the nick of time, the plane lifts and goes airborne. Below, earthbound landmarks grow smaller; it’s all calm, clear skies ahead. Relief, however, is all too brief—suddenly, it’s time to land, and the nerves kick right back in.
This mini adventure takes place in a matter of minutes and in the safety of a flight simulator in Columbia’s EdVenture children’s museum. But, the sensory experience is remarkably realistic. Now, to truly get a feel for what it’s like sitting in an airplane cockpit, step just a few feet away and climb inside a real one with a two-story-high view over the Congaree River and the Gervais Street bridge.
“A lot of our visitors have never been on an airplane; this gives them that feeling,” EdVenture president and CEO Karen Coltrane says of the Flight exhibit that opened last summer. The standout feature of the exhibit is visible from the museum’s exterior—the nose of an airplane juts out from the west side of the building, intriguing visitors to come inside, where they can sit in the pilot’s seat, toggle the cockpit controls and peer out at the vista beyond.
“When one of the first kids in here said, ‘This is awesome!’ I knew we got it right,” Coltrane says. “And, when the parents try to climb in that cockpit, too, that also says we got it right.”
Flight is designed as more than an entertaining outing for kids, she says. With experiential learning activities to appeal to guests from toddlers to teens, Flight is also meant to plant the seeds of interest in future aviation careers, especially in South Carolina’s burgeoning aeronautics industry.
“The point is to get more kids thinking, ‘Hey, I like that Flight exhibit; I wonder if I could do something like that?’” Coltrane says.
The exhibit’s Boeing 757 cockpit, rescued from an “airplane boneyard” in Mississippi for display at EdVenture, features mostly illustrated controls, but there are enough moveable switches, knobs and levers to keep kids occupied and engaged and to give them a sense of the pilot’s workspace. Other real-life aeronautical parts include the massive Boeing 747 cowling (that’s the piece that covers a plane’s wing-mounted engine) at the exhibit entrance, as well as a cabin set-up with salvaged airplane seats, still with their original seatbelts and fold-down tray tables. Visitors can take a seat just like any airplane passenger (“But we have more leg room,” Coltrane jokes) and watch a video screen at the front of the cabin showing looping footage of views from a plane flying over Columbia and Lake Murray.
It’s not all about the pilot’s view, though. “Not everybody wants to be a pilot,” Coltrane says. “There are plenty of jobs here in South Carolina in building airplanes—jobs as engineers, technicians, jobs that need skills in design and problem-solving.”
Kids can learn about lift, one of the forces needed for flight, by stepping into a kid-sized wind tunnel and strapping on a pair of wings while air rushes by. They can manipulate a Kuka robot, which demonstrates the technology used in building airplanes.
For a more hands-on approach to learning aerodynamics, there’s a station equipped with plenty of scrap paper and instructions for how to fold paper into a plane that will fly. After testing their handmade aircraft by tossing them through targeted hoops, kids can return to the table to tweak their designs.
“We know at any given moment a spark can happen for a child,” Coltrane says. “We’re setting up an environment here for that to happen.”
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Get There
EdVenture is located at 211 Gervais St., Columbia.
HOURS: Open daily, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.
ADMISSION: Adults and children 2 and older, $11.50; seniors (ages 62 and up) and military personnel or educators with ID, $10.50; members and children under 2, free.
DETAILS: For more information, visit edventure.org or call (803) 779-3100.