Volunteers with more than 700 years of combined military service share their expertise with students
Retired now, I was a teacher with the Annapolis Valley Regional School Board in Nova Scotia for 35 years. For the last decade or so, I have been privileged to be a participant—first as a teacher and now as a volunteer—in a flight education program at the Greenwood Military Aviation Museum (GMAM) at the RCAF base in the small town of Greenwood, Nova Scotia.
Here in the Annapolis Valley, we are an hour or two away from the city and some of its learning opportunities, such as museums. It is not always possible to get our students to these locations. The GMAM has provided local schools with access to learning experiences in technology, flight and history, especially through its wonderful flight education program.
The program is piloted by Lloyd Graham, a retired air force navigator. It all began with a conversation I had with Lloyd back in 2003, in which I expressed what a shame it was that a wonderful resource like the museum was not being utilized by our schools, especially since flight education was part of the Grade 6 curriculum in Nova Scotia.
Within days, Lloyd came to my school to pick up a copy of the province’s department of education curriculum guide. With a team of aircrew volunteers, Lloyd created a flight education program that could be given through the museum and was positively received by the school board. This was an ambitious mission and one into which Lloyd and a team of museum volunteers put many hours.
The program is successful thanks to the exceptional commitment of some 23 volunteer instructors who are mainly retired air force aircrew, along with a few active-duty air and ground crew, as well as civilian personnel. All of these volunteers bring a wide range of expertise to the program in such areas as long-range patrol, fighter and helicopter operations, theory of flight, the Cold War era, search and rescue, and aircraft design, to name a few. In a typical year, volunteers have a combined total of 721.5 years of military service and more than 150,000 flying hours.
The flight education program runs from January to April. Each instructor makes a commitment of about 35 hours per session and, after a dozen years, more than 5,000 students, teachers and chaperones from 14 different schools have participated. Groups of students are guided through six stations where they spend 20 minutes engaged in every aspect of flight education—and it all runs with military precision. Once back in the classroom, students are asked to reflect on their museum experience and write letters to the instructors.
It is not only a wonderful opportunity for students to experience flight education and history from those who lived it but also an occasion to interact with our veterans, ask questions and hear their stories. Now that I’m retired, I get to hang out with these exceptional people on flight education days. I have an even greater respect for the instructors and the time they spend with the students. I now realize what a commitment of time it really is. I also enjoy seeing how much fun they have.
—by Connie Weinberg, Aylesford, Nova Scotia