Isaiah Cooper a 16-year-old from Compton, CA has just become one of the youngest black pilots to fly across the country.
With only a matter of two weeks, the teen completed his 8,000-mile flight trip earlier this week.
However, there were a few obstacles along the way. His flight instructor Robin Petgrave spoke about how he tackled the hardships, “He was able to execute the emergency procedures flawlessly, got it on the road, landed, didn’t damage the houses, the schools, the construction crew, nothing. I mean he got out of that thing safely.”
Cooper admitted that he hasn’t always made the right decisions in his young life, but once he realized that he turned to a program in Compton called, Tomorrow’s Aeronautical Museum (TAM) to make more positive choices.
“I began attending an aviation youth program in Compton at Tomorrow’s Aeronautical Museum (TAM) when I was 5 years old. I began hanging with the wrong crowd, doing seriously self-destructive things. Realizing that this was not how I wanted to live my life, I returned to TAM. My main goal is to become a productive young man with a future in aviation, and not a statistic.”
Source: http://www.vibe.com/2016/07/isaiah-cooper-youngest-black-pilot/
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