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

An Indian-origin teenager based here has become one of the youngest pilots to fly a single-engine aircraft, a media report said.

Mansour Anis, a 14-year-old Grade 9 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 on Wednesday.

"let it be known throughout the aviation world that Mansour Anis at the age of 14 years successfully took off and landed from 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 United Arab Emirates (UAE) after his achievement, Anis 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," Anis' father Ali Asgar told Gulf News on Wednesday.

Anis, who also 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 per cent 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 back.