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    UCI students are building a WWI biplane from scratch. It’s not like building a Lego set
    • April 14, 2026

    To understand UC Irvine students’ experience building a full-scale World War I Marine Corps biplane from scratch, consider this perspective from one student at the helm: It’s like building a Lego set, but pieces are missing. And there are no instructions.

    Stuti Patel, a fourth-year mechanical engineering student, recently delivered that analogy with a laugh while working on the project out of the historic Hangar 297 at Irvine’s Great Park — the hangar currently serves as a temporary storage and restoration space for the under-construction Flying Leatherneck Aviation Museum. 

    Eighty or so UCI mechanical and aerospace engineering students, led by Patel and co-project manager Silvia Tinelli and aided by volunteers from the museum, are a year into a project that will bring a piece of aviation history to life.

    The American Curtiss JN-4, or “Jenny,” is a wooden, two-seater known for barnstorming, or air stunts, and delivering mail; the Jenny models taught most U.S. pilots to fly during the WWI era, training wheels so to speak, before pilots moved onto the combat-bound DH-4 De Havilland.

    The model in the works won’t be airborne. But it’ll be in the air. The plane will hang in an entryway rotunda and is the planned centerpiece for the Flying Leatherneck Aviation Museum that will be opening as part of the Great Park Cultural Terrace. When open, the museum will showcase various aviation artifacts and exhibits, and more than 40 military airplanes and helicopters.

    “I’ve always wanted to build an airplane,” Patel said. She’d been obsessed with airplanes since touring the Boeing Everett Factory in Washington in the fourth grade, she said. And for the aviation fanatic, ice cream stick planes never made the cut.

    • Student and co-project manager Stuti Patel works on a World...

      Student and co-project manager Stuti Patel works on a World War I Marine Corps biplane, the Curtiss JN-4, “Jenny” in Irvine, CA on Thursday, April 9, 2026. Students from UC Irvine’s Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering are working with volunteers from the Flying Leatherneck Aviation Museum to build a full-scale replica of the plane. (Photo by Paul Bersebach, Orange County Register/SCNG)

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    Student and co-project manager Stuti Patel works on a World War I Marine Corps biplane, the Curtiss JN-4, “Jenny” in Irvine, CA on Thursday, April 9, 2026. Students from UC Irvine’s Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering are working with volunteers from the Flying Leatherneck Aviation Museum to build a full-scale replica of the plane. (Photo by Paul Bersebach, Orange County Register/SCNG)

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    Ground zero

    Last year, Glenn Roquemore, who chairs the education committee of the Flying Leathernecks Heritage Foundation, was searching for eager students to build the iconic Jenny plane, based off of one that had been crashed and never restored.

    “One of our board members purchased most of the parts — about 70%,” Roquemore said, “and so I took the lead on beginning that process of building the plane.”

    A former professor at the university, Roquemore thought of enlisting UCI students.

    To start, students were given bins of old plans for the model. But they are unsorted, incomplete and from different planes. Many drawings were for the Curtiss JN-4 Canuck, the Canadian variant.

    “A month or two months in, we realized we didn’t have everything we needed and it was all mixed up,” Patel said. “We are still doing research now.”

    To fill the gaps, students cross-referenced various museum plans and models, historical photographs and documents from around the country to understand the plane’s finer details.

    Patel and Tinelli then divided students into four teams, each group chipping away at either the plane’s engine, fuselage, tail or wings.

    Some of the original plane’s pieces, such as the wooden planks and an air filter, were restored and integrated into the replica.

    The original engine and propeller were stripped apart, cleaned and reassembled and will lie on the museum floor for visitors to observe up close. A decorative engine and propeller will be 3D-printed for the new plane.

    • A radiator from a World War I Marine Corps biplane,...

      A radiator from a World War I Marine Corps biplane, the Curtiss JN-4, “Jenny” sits on a table in Irvine, CA on Thursday, April 9, 2026. Students from UC Irvine’s Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering are working with volunteers from the Flying Leatherneck Aviation Museum to build a full-scale replica of the plane. (Photo by Paul Bersebach, Orange County Register/SCNG)

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    A radiator from a World War I Marine Corps biplane, the Curtiss JN-4, “Jenny” sits on a table in Irvine, CA on Thursday, April 9, 2026. Students from UC Irvine’s Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering are working with volunteers from the Flying Leatherneck Aviation Museum to build a full-scale replica of the plane. (Photo by Paul Bersebach, Orange County Register/SCNG)

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    Some parts were commissioned. The plane’s wheels, for example, were custom-built based on historical photos by a local motorcycle shop.

    Students built the rest from scratch, aided by laser cutters and 3D printers, and it’s a constant process of trial and error, they said.

    And none of it was easy, but “the positioning and alignment of everything was the most difficult,” Patel said.

    “I think we measured the distance of where each rib goes at least 30 times. We’d come in every day and triple check because once you blew it, yes you can remove it — we would take a chisel, take it out and then redo it — but it would ruin a bit of the wood,” she said.

    Once the plane’s body is done, it will be “doped” or tightly wrapped in a plastic lacquer — a process associated with early 20th century biplanes.

    The students are working toward an early 2027 completion, before the Flying Leatherneck Aviation Museum’s planned opening that spring, because the rotunda’s walls will have to be installed around the plane.

    The museum was first established in 1989 at the Marine Corps Air Station El Toro, before moving to MCAS Miramar in San Diego in 1999. It’s now back home in the Great Park, which is growing out of the former El Toro base. 

    Retired Col. Tom O’Malley, who’s also lending students a helping hand, remembers Hangar 297 when it was bustling with “hundreds of Marines, flying all over the world.” The bases shuttered in 1999.

    “It was my workplace in the ’80s,” O’Malley said, “and to see these young, mechanical engineering students coming in and putting their engineering skills to work, it’s just amazing. It’s a payback.

    “I retired as a colonel,” O’Malley added, “and now I’m taking orders from them.”

    ​ Orange County Register 

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