Indian-origin boy of 14 among the youngest to fly single-engine plane

An Indian-origin teenager has become one of the youngest pilots to fly a single-engine aircraft, a media report said. Mansour Anis, a 14-year-old grade-nine student at Delhi Private School in Sharjah received a certificate for his first solo flight from an aviation academy in Canada last week, Gulf News reported.

"Let it be known throughout the aviation world that Mansour Anis, at the age of 14 years, successfully took off and landed at Langley Regional Airport, thereby accomplishing his first solo flight," the solo flight certificate issued by AAA Aviation Flight Academy on August 30 stated.

Back in the UAE after his achievement, Mansour claimed that he had also set a record of being the youngest pilot to fly solo with the least number of training hours, the newspaper reported.

He broke the previous record of a 15-year-old German pilot and a 14-year-old US pilot who took 34 hours of training. Mansour flew solo just after 25 hours of training, his father Ali Asgar told Gulf News recently.

Mansour, who flew a Cessna 152 aircraft during his solo flight, now has a student pilot permit. Apart from the flying test, he also passed a radio communication test and scored 96 percent in the PSTAR Test, an eligibility test for Transport Canada.

His solo flight was about 10 minutes long, during which he taxied the aircraft from the parking bay to the runway, took off for a flight of about five minutes, and landed. Ali, who is a civil engineer at Zulekha Hospital, had sent his son and wife to Canada for training sessions during the summer vacation. Talking about his inspiration, the young boy said,

I got fascinated about flying the plane because of my uncle. He has been my inspiration and he has inspired me to become a commercial pilot after I turn 18.

With inputs from IANS.

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