Hooper Bay, Alaska, might not be quite the end of the earth but, as the saying goes, you can probably see it from there. It’s a tiny town halfway up the western Alaskan coast, north of the Aleutian Islands, and the 1,200 people who live there actually can see Russia from their back doors. In fact, they’re probably closer to Russia than they are to civilization. Seriously. The community is made up almost entirely of Yupik Eskimos who have to travel 500 miles to get to the nearest road and 200 miles to the nearest hospital. It’s dark, cold and snowy for a good part of the year, and anything that comes into Hooper Bay has to arrive by either barge or plane — which means material items are expensive to obtain.
But whatever else the 170 high school students in Hooper Bay may lack, they have one thing a lot of other high school students in the United States would love to have: an airplane. A soon-to-be-flyable airplane. A Thorp T-211 or Sky Skooter, to be exact. And when it flies, the students of Hooper Bay will also have the satisfaction of knowing they built the plane themselves.
