A Vernon teenager is flying high this summer.
Literally.
Kensington Hewson, who is 15, has passed her test to receive her pilots licence.
“She isn’t old enough to drive but she can fly a plane,” proud mother Melissa Brown said.
Kensington has been studying to get her licence for the past year-and-a-half at Aurora Aviation in Vernon.
“My grandpa was a pilot and he always had a plane when I was little and I always flew with him. And then someone told me I could get my licence when I was 16, so I went for a familiarization flight and kept doing that,” Hewson told Vernon Matters.
The Clarence Fulton student said her process to get a licence was longer than others due to her age.
“It’s kind of hard because some people don’t take me seriously because I was so young. It was more I had to wait so long as my training had to be stretched out, so I kind of forgot some stuff over time because I had to take breaks.”
Hewson said some people can take the course over a couple of months.
“But since I had two years to do it, I would start and then I would have to wait a bit to make more money and then I would have to redo some stuff because it had been so long,” she said.
The course was about 100 hours of online studies which took her about a year, and was done after school and in her spare/support block at school.
“The actual flying part, depending on when the sun when down, like in the fall and winter, I would actually skip classes to go flying, and in the summer, I can go after school,” she said.
Hewson, who is going into Grade 11 at Fulton this fall, now has 65 hours of flying experience.
“I have a recreational pilot licence. It’s like a step down from a private pilot licence. The only difference is I’m only allowed to have one passenger and I’m not allowed to fly at night.”
Kensington’s father is a part owner of two planes which she can use, a Cessa 172 and Cessna 182.
Her long term goal is to be a commercial airline pilot.
“I want to join the military first and go to school and after that become an airline pilot,” she said.
As for being able to fly a plane, and not a vehicle at this point, Kensington has learned some things about that.
“Flying a plane is more complicated but everyone who flies a plane knows what they’re doing. Not everyone who drives a car knows what they’re doing,” Hewson said with a laugh.
