Destination Aviation

As Spring Break is coming to a close, its once again time to highlight what went down in the stages leading up to, and at, Destination Imagination Regionals. I have written multiple posts about DI in the past, and they all exhibit the same feelings towards the event; I never look forward to it, but I always see how I learned from it, once it’s over. However, even after knowing this is the way I think, I still don’t exactly look forward to it! All joking aside though, DI genuinely is a great way to take a look at where your mentality is at in the middle of the school year. There are so many ways you can take the project, that everyone can show what they’re made of. Whether you’re feeling like a leader, or someone who can be told what to do and then do it, there’s something for everyone with DI.

I was quite happy with my group again this year (Luca, Logan, Isy, Jamie, Melika). After being with these people for – in most cases – 3 years, there’s no one in the classroom I wouldn’t be happy with having on my team, we all work well together. After nearly going to war with another group over what challenge we wanted, we lost and ended up with what was easily the most difficult DI challenge any one of us had ever faced: Technical. Our job was basically to create an aircraft that could carry a payload, and be controlled to fly over a designated drop zone and release said payload in this drop zone for points, then land, then do that 4 more times. On paper it seemed difficult, and boy lemme tell you, it was even harder in reality…

This whole project was a mentally gruelling process. Our group was at a stand still all stuck at the same mental block, not knowing where to even begin designing an aircraft and a story. After countless days of ‘brainstorming’ we realized we had to get going and we split up our group by gender, having the boys take the role of the aircraft and the technical side, and the girls handling the story and prop creation. There were numerous blurred lines in terms of who was supposed to do what within these sub groups, and I think this is where a lot of my confusion arose from. I felt pretty lost and like I didn’t know what to do. I should have spoken up sooner and found work to do as there was clearly enough to go around! 

I won’t bore you with our entire creation process because it would just include me realizing how many lazy, selfish mistakes I made. The bottom line is that I was almost in denial of DI existing that I didn’t go out of my way to make sure I had something to do. I feel bad about what I did – or rather didn’t – do, and I’m thankful my team hasn’t shunned me the way I deserve. The only reason I didn’t realize the extent of my faults at the time, is because I was caught up on the performance and figured I could make a positive impact there. Speaking of which, let’s discuss our performance and the day of DI in general.

Waking up on the Saturday morning I wasn’t that nervous. I had practiced my lines plentiful with my brother the night before, and I was ready to go. Our team challenge and instant challenge were both in the afternoon, so we spent the entire morning sitting down as a group and reading over our lines, all the while Jamie worked on our last-resort drone. Our instant challenge was first, and heading up for it we all knew our roles and we were ready. I don’t think I’m allowed to say much, but I can talk about how our group functioned. None of us are proud of the way we performed at the instant challenge, however I don’t think that’s fair to ourselves as looking back on it we did everything correct, we were just unlucky with the overall finished product. If anything, I feel like I could have spoken up more and shared my ideas. I spoke with Logan about it afterwards as well and he felt the same way. So going in to Provincials I think we all need to make our voice heard and to be confident enough to share the ideas we have.

Our main challenge was another tale of misfortune. About a half hour before we were set to go on stage, while performing a normal, calm practice flight of the drone, it went haywire on Jamie and despite showing any physical damage, the drone appeared to not work properly. It wouldn’t take off and we were all clueless as to why. Our aircraft plans were already basically in shambles and this didn’t help. We had no choice but to head in to our performance without a working drone. 

All in all I think our performances highs were completely overshadowed by the triumphant low that was not having an aircraft. As bummed as we all were, we knew that wasn’t the extent of our talent and creation, and were all going to be working hard to present something of high quality at Provincials. I’ll check in with you again soon, but until then thanks for reading.