An 8-year-old boy from north Georgia who can’t drive yet, but he sure can fly and become the youngest person ever to solo pilot a hot-air-balloon.
JT Head took his record-setting 20-minute on July 10, soaring 400 feet for a mile and a half over the Sautee Valley near Helen, local TV station 11 Alive reported.
JT, who is a fourth-grader, has learned to fly from his own dad, Tarp Head, who has been piloting balloons for four decades now.
JT said, “My dad owns a hot-air balloon company, so I got really interested in hot-air balloons, and so I decided that I wanted to do a solo flight one day.”
“He’s done quite a bit of preparation for years,” Head said, adding JT had practiced flying a remote-control model before he took off alone.
While JT was flying, e had the chance to see things that are ordinary to him in a new angle: “I saw the sun setting. I saw a lot of cows…,” he told the news outlet. “My favorite thing was probably seeing the back of Yonah Mountain.”
Right after landing, JT called Bobby Bradley, a boy who broke the record when he was 9 in 2011. Bradley made his flight to New Mexico.
“When I was 4, I said that I would beat his record,” said JT.
Bradley penned a message for the new record-holder, Head said. “(Bobby) wrote JT a note for him saying, ‘Well, you did it. You told me you would do it, and you — I guess you’ve done it now’.”
Source: New York Post