If students in Ocean Lakes High School’s auditorium learned anything this morning, it was: There is life outside of football.
Ocean Lakes, in partnership with Mitsubishi’s Dream and Soar program, held a special assembly this morning with guest speaker Barrington Irving, the youngest pilot as well as first African-American to fly solo around the world.
Irving, though, had much different intentions in high school. A gifted athlete, Irving was a star football player with several athletic scholarship opportunities. It was a chance meeting with a pilot though that turned his attention from the sidelines to the skies.
“I had a passion for something in my life,” Irving said, “which was to fly.”
He turned down his full-ride scholarship offers and instead ventured out to take on the world of aviation. He obsessively chased one goal: to fly solo across the globe. Thanks to a never-say-die attitude and a relentless search for sponsors, Irving met his goal. Through the course of his 97-day flight, he flew for 145 hours and made 27 different stops in 13 different countries.
Irving told students of his many adventures in the air, including flying through an ice storm in Alaska, as well as flying in a sand storm over Saudi Arabia.
With his experience — not to mention a Guinness Book World Record as the youngest pilot to fly around the earth — Irving is encouraging students to give serious thought to chasing their own aviation dreams with furthering their education in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) subjects.
He has launched new programs, including having students from urban school divisions build a plane for him to fly, as well as build a car which he will race against a jet plane. In addition, students can follow along with him on his next adventure: The Flying Classroom. It will be a six-month trek to all seven continents where he will solve math and science problems during 36 different expeditions. Students across the world will help him with each problem as he will communicate and live blog with classrooms while in the air as well as on land.
“Math and science have changed my life,” Irving said. “I want to help young people discover the career opportunities. The careers of the future…those top ten careers will be in math and science.”
For more information about these programs, follow Irving online at www.experienceaviation.org.