A nine-year-old girl from Devon, England, is taking a step closer to her dream of becoming a pilot by experiencing flying first-hand.
Ellie Carter is learning about aeronautics with flying instructor Martin Kettle. She cannot wait until she is 14 so that she can fly under instruction and then fly solo at 16. At 17 she will be able to complete her private pilot’s licence.
Kettle is taking Ellie on flights a couple of days every month at Draycot Aerodrome in Chiseldon, near Swindon, Wiltshire. The schoolgirl said her love of aviation grew from an interest in aeroplanes.
“I just started having a fascination about aeroplanes and it went on from there,” she said.
“Flying is really good fun, I really love it. We take off, we fly, we do quite a long flight and we do lots and lots of manoeuvres. We do quite a lot of fun things like wingovers and really sharp turns and we go up and down like a rollercoaster.”
Unlike many teenagers, she wants to pass her pilot’s licence before she learns to drive a car – and then aims to become the first British foreign exchange U-2 pilot
Ellie said that while in the air she does experiments illustrating gravity and G-force by using China, a toy panda, which is hung up in the cockpit from a hook with a piece of string.
“The G is not a force pulling you down, it is a force at speed time,” she said. “We hang the panda up and if the force of gravity is not forcing you down, the panda will stay vertical with the aeroplane. Our next experiment is to do the Bob Hoover’s roll with a glass of water.”
Ellie’s favourite aircraft is the US U-2 spy plane, which she got to see earlier this year at RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire.
She had written to the Royal International Air Tattoo, which is held annually at the base, to see if they could bring the U-2 to the airshow.
The organisers were so impressed they arranged for Ellie to meet the plane and its crew when it stopped off in the UK on the way back to the US.
The Monkleigh Primary School pupil got to travel at 193 kilometres per hour in the chase car as it drove alongside the landing U-2, which flies at more than 21,336 metres and so close to space that the pilot has to wear a spacesuit.
Ellie was presented with a ‘solo flight patch’ – the only one ever given to someone who has not actually completed a flight in the U-2 – and she now wears it proudly on her green flying suit.
Unlike many teenagers, she wants to pass her pilot’s licence before she learns to drive a car – and then aims to become the first British foreign exchange U-2 pilot.