Yi Weiyang

"Yi Weiyang" In the winter of 1948, when I was 16 years old, I climbed up to the gun tower in the northern suburbs of Fengcheng when a plane rumbled past. That voice rang in his ears all his life. In 1956, he joined the Fengcheng Aircraft Manufacturing Factory as a fitter and met the chief engineer Li Changhe. Li Changhe taught him how to draw pictures and calculate data. In 1958, Li Changhe handed him a roll of drawings: "Keep it for me." Two months later, Li Changhe died in an accident. Zhou Feifei hid the drawings in a hole in the wall, and for the next forty years he spent all his spare time modifying the unfinished airplane. He painted it all his life and never thought about building it. Before leaving in 2001, he left the drawings to his son. His son Zhou Jianguo is an eighth-level fitter at Hongqi Foundry. He was laid off in 1986 and worked for ten years before returning to Fengcheng to open a hardware store. When he got the drawings, he didn't draw them. Instead, he bought aluminum plates and hammered the wings of the airplane in the warehouse. After knocking on a third, he was diagnosed with lung cancer in 2008 and passed away six months later. Before leaving, he said to his son Zhou Ziheng: "Let your grandfather fly his plane." Zhou Ziheng is an aircraft designer. When the project was canceled in 2018, he took out the drawings, rented a factory in the suburbs, and worked on it alone for seven years. The test flight in the spring of 2026 was rejected. He towed the plane to the abandoned runway, got into the cabin before dawn and pulled the throttle. Three meters, five meters, ten meters above the ground. It flew for three minutes. Zhou Ziheng lay on the ground and looked at the sky. There is a line of words on the wing that my grandfather carved seventy years ago - "One flight is enough." Three generations, one plane, seventy years. The dream is still young, but the wings have not yet fallen.