real sharkplane

i cant believe i haven't uploaded these until now O.O WARNING: wall of text ahead...the story behind this amazing moment in history must be told

in September of 2012, after just starting the A&P program at my school, a powerful storm hit, causing one the mobile staircases to break loose and smash into the school's famous 737, putting a nasty hole in the nose cone. the school figured they'd let the maintenance students repair the damaged nosecone, but somehow it was determined it was too bad of a hole to be repaired, so the school eventually obtained two replacement 737 nosecones the following semester, apparently a 2 for 1 deal or something at the time the teacher who had located the nosecones was teaching my airframe structures2 class, and one of the things they teach you in that class is how to paint an aircraft, so since our class was already cleaning and preparing the two nosecones, i suggested that we should paint a shark's mouth on one of them >:3 the teacher really liked the idea, so i figured we were actually gonna do it! but unfortunately we never did, the president of the aviation program (AKA Cad Spinner) and the structures2 teacher were having all sorts of conflicts regarding budget and supplies, so yeah, many of the projects we were supposed to do that semester were canceled cuz we were never given the supplies we needed...one of those projects being the shark's mouth so a plain nosecone was put on the 737 and it seemed like the idea was forgotten


but a year later the next class of mechanic students had the same teacher for structures2, and apparently they got off much better than my class did in terms of supplies, so the class proceeded to go through with the shark's mouth idea one of the students in that class was a veteran who had worked on A-10s, so he printed some pictures up and the class decided as a whole they were going to model the shark's mouth after the ones that were painted on A-10s so for months they worked on the other nose cone, laying out the design and slowly painting on each layer of color until it was finally complete in April of 2014 the shark's mouth nosecone finally was a reality! was a thing of beauty, the class really did an amazing job on it


so in May, just a few days before the semester ended, they decided to put the shark's mouth nosecone on the 737 just to see what it looked like and man, it looked fucking awesome it ended up looking kinda small compared to the rest of the plane, but yeah, that was to be expected. unfortunately it only stayed up for a day and a half, the president of the aviation program had a HUGE fit when he saw this thing on the school's beloved, fading and decaying 737 (i guess a boyscout tour group was scheduled to come just few hours after i took these pics and yeah, he didnt want them to see a shark's mouth on a 737...like thats totally gonna put a bunch of young boys off to aviation...really...) the teacher and the class that painted this eventually tried sending a petition around saying they made this to honor veterans, and even though it got a bunch of signatures, the president still made them take it down and put the plain one back on


so now the shark's mouth nosecone sits in the paint shop, a silent testimony to the creative powers of aviation maintenance students, as well as their rebellion against oppressive authority