COURTESY OF CAPE COD COMMUNITY COLLEGE: The gift of a 1972 Sabreliner Model 40 twin-engine jet for the college’s Aviation Maintenance Technology Program lands Monday at Plymouth Municipal Airport.
PLYMOUTH – Cape Cod Community College’s new Aviation Maintenance Technology Program has received a boost from a twin-engine jet.
On Monday, the school received the donation of a working 1972 Sabreliner Model 40 twin-engine jet from the Safe Flight Instrument Corporation of White Plains, New York at the program’s hangar at Plymouth Municipal Airport.
College spokesman Michael Gross said the gift is critical to the program.
“Without this gift, or without some other way of finding an operating engine for them to work on, we could not be certified,” Gross said.
For the program to be certified to provide a power plant maintenance, repair and overhaul curriculum, the students need to be able to train on working turbojet engines.
The jet will also benefit students training on airframe, including its fuselage and wings, and its electronics.
“It’s an amazing aircraft,” Gross said. “This would be what you would see as the corporate jet of the 70s and 80s.”
The college was chosen over other training programs to receive the donation of the jet.
“They had an individual who came and interviewed us and talked about how we would use it and what it would mean to our programs and apparently did that with at least two other programs,” Gross said. “[They] were so impressed by what was going on in Plymouth they made the donation to us.”
Gross said the students couldn’t be happier when it arrived and swarmed the jet to learn as much as they could from the pilot who flew it in.
The students were also put to work when it touched down.
“Students had to push it into the hangar,” Gross said. “Everybody [was] all hands on deck to push a great, big jet aircraft in there. It seats eleven people in a configuration of kind of a corporate setting. So it’s a pretty darn good sized aircraft.”
By BRIAN MERCHANT, CapeCod.com NewsCenter
About CapeCod.com NewsCenter
