1 day ago
9
At 15 years and 10 months of age, Byron Waller can’t order a pint and has never driven a car, but on Wednesday afternoon he landed his small plane at an airport in Brighton, on England’s south coast. It was the 16th or so stop (he can’t quite remember) of a remarkable airborne odyssey that he hopes will make him the youngest supported pilot to fly around the world.
The adventure began at his home in Brisbane, Australia, four weeks ago and has taken the teenager across the Indian Ocean and through the Middle East to Europe, from where he will venture around the other half of the globe back home. Though he is accompanied by an instructor – global aviation rules not easily permitting children to fly around the world on their own – Byron does all the flying of their tiny single-engined Sling TSi aircraft.
They spend the flights – the longest of which so far was a 10-hour stretch from Singapore to Sri Lanka – chatting, calling family or occasionally listening to music, if he can get it to work, the teenager told the Guardian.
What’s on the playlist? “Normally a good bit of Top Gun towards the start of the cruise, and then go into something else. I like to have it quiet for takeoff and landing, just so you can hear air traffic control and stuff.”
It may not be how a typical teenager will spend September, but little about Byron’s life so far has been typical. Very unwell almost from birth, he spent his childhood in and out of hospital – “sometimes it was weekly, sometimes it was daily, sometimes it was monthly” – before finally being diagnosed with the bowel condition Crohn’s disease aged 14. “It took a big toll on my life,” he said. “I missed birthday parties, missed school, missed, like, just normal school sports and all that sort of stuff.”
Despite this, or perhaps because of it, he caught the flying bug young, thanks to a Scouts activity day that involved a trip in a small plane when he was just four. “That was the start of it, and from there it was like a fire lighting. It just kept sparking.”
His had his first flying lesson at 13 and obsessively loved it. “It was like a new beginning, really. It gave me motivation to keep going and get out of the hospital.” The following year, finally in remission, “I thought: how do I raise awareness for Crohn’s and the Queensland children’s hospital, which I’d spent most of my life in? And I thought I’d fly around Australia.” That mission having been completed last year, the world was next.
What do his parents make of it? “Yeah, I had to persuade them a little bit. At first they were a bit worried, but they’ve seen how safe it actually is and how we’ve put in the correct strategies to make sure the trips are as safe as possible. They were a little bit worried, but now they’re fine with it.” They are all in constant contact, often during flights, he said, with his mother, Jeni Langdon, acting as his manager, fixer and publicist back home in Brisbane.
Apart from the personal challenge, he hopes his story will inspire other young people. “People just don’t have the right motivation. They’re all on their devices. They just don’t have the motivation to overcome barriers. And I thought: why not try make a global mission of showing people that they can achieve their dreams, they can overcome their obstacles?”
After a brief touchdown at the International Ayr Show in Glasgow this weekend, Byron’s next stop will be Iceland, then Greenland, then onwards. He hopes to land back home on 13 October, his birthday, where he is looking forward to seeing his family and his dog – and to turning 16, when he can finally apply for a recreational pilot’s licence, allowing him to fly a single-engine plane without supervision.
“I might have a week off flying, and then I’ll get into it again,” he said.
