LATROBE, Pa. — Rhiannon Bowman and Jeremy Pasparage, both juniors at the Mount Pleasant Area Junior and Senior High School, are among nearly 100 students in Westmoreland County who’ve spent the last few months working to design and build a model vertiport.
A vertiport is like an airport or helipad and would allow things like drones and other vertical take-off and landing aircraft to operate.
“This landing pad right here is where mail will be prioritized, and this landing pad over here will be for people,” Bowman said while showing their model vertiport.
These aircraft can be used for public transit, delivering life-saving medication, or helping someone in an emergency.
“Going into cardiac arrest, if you’re in a car crash, if you’ve overdosed on something and need to get to a hospital soon, that’s what this is for,” added Liam McCabe, an eighth grader at Penn Middle School.
This competition had three top winners from the junior and senior high school level, and the middle school level. First place winners in each got a $500 scholarship for any sort of aviation class, as well as some other prizes.
“They want to look forward to the future,” said Maureen Grace, Gifted Support Teacher at Mt. Pleasant Area Junior/Senior High School. “They know they can’t have the job their grandparents and parents had and they want to see what’s out there and they’re very enthusiastic about it.”
There’s also the potential that some of the ideas these middle and high school students came up with could be built right in Latrobe.
“We think it’s a great opportunity for us to be the prototype for what this is going to have to offer, and we’ll incorporate their ideas as part of the concept ideas as we move forward,” said Gabe Monzo, Executive Director of the Westmoreland County Airport Authority.
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