High schoolers help restore World War II-era plane, taking aviation dreams to new heights

DALLAS — At Dallas Executive Airport, small planes regularly thunder down a runway and blast into the open sky. Less than a four-minute walk away, one aircraft has been sitting in quiet limbo — dormant and deconstructed.

In a classroom at the Henry B. Tippie National Aviation Education Center, the wings of a 1946 Piper J-3 Cub plane lie barren, resembling a gargantuan metallic skeleton. Twice a week, the room becomes a buzzing hive for eight students from Dubiski Career High School who are working to give this World War II-era plane a second life.

On a Monday in December, instructor Rhett Rechenmacher and high school senior Cesar Trevizo were stationed at a pair of sewing machines, which flickered and hummed. He was guiding his student on how to hem pieces of white fabric together.

“Hold your left hand,” Rechenmacher said sternly.

While Trevizo hopes to become an aircraft mechanic, he found himself fiddling with the sewing machine because attaching fabric onto the metal structure was the next step to return the aircraft to its former glory. If metal framework is the plane’s skeleton, fabric is the skin.

“[Rechenmacher] doesn’t just want us to start sewing it on, if we don’t know how to sew, at least a little practice,” Trevizo said.

Reconstructing planes requires students to be a “jack of all trades”: a seamstress, carpenter, metallurgist, blacksmith and more, Rechenmacher said. That’s why he warns “lazy men” to stay away from the profession.

The gruff plane mechanic admits his teaching style is like him: old school. Fooling around isn’t suggested under his watchful eye. The former cowboy has a penchant for horses, but once he started working on planes, he found a...