No lab, no money: how Aligarh students built a flying jet

There is no laboratory at Composite Vidyalaya Bhilawali. No 3D printers, no imported equipment, nothing shipped in from abroad. It is a government school in Aligarh’s Akrabad block in Uttar Pradesh, with classrooms, benches and textbooks, and children who walk miles to reach it every morning. It is also where a group of students recently built something that stunned the country.

The students, all studying in Classes 4 to 8, built a flying model of the F-22 Raptor, a fifth-generation stealth fighter jet built by Lockheed Martin for the United States Air Force. They did not use expensive kits or high-end materials. The model was built from thermocol waste, toy motors, basic wires and simple electronics, and it did not just sit on a shelf looking impressive: it flew, reportedly reaching distances of up to 1.5 kilometres.

The total cost of the build came to approximately Rs 6,000, a fraction of what similar STEM projects typically cost in better-resourced schools. The achievement is being credited to a grassroots initiative called Robotics Ki Pathshala, a programme that brings hands-on science and engineering education to government school students across Uttar Pradesh, working on the principle that children learn best by building rather than by memorising formulas.

Under the guidance of a teacher at the school, the Aligarh students have gained attention for robotics workshops that use scrap materials for hands-on learning, turning what most people would throw away into tools for experimentation. The F-22 Raptor build, completed in March 2026, is described as the most spectacular result of that approach so far.

The video of the flying model has since been viewed by millions online, drawing attention to what government school children can achieve when given even basic guidance and materials, without access to elite private schools or dedicated STEM labs.

Wikimedia Commons/by Scott Wolfe, U.S. Air Force (representational image of a U.S. Air Force F-22 Raptor in flight; not the actual student-built model)