When Jordan Barrett of Waterford says he is going to do something, it happens.

“Ever since he was a child, he has followed through with whatever he sets his mind on,” his mother, Carole, said. 

When he was 12 years old he remembers looking up in the sky, watching a plane fly over and saying to himself, “That looks really cool, I want to learn to fly.”

That dream was delayed when he found out he could not get his pilot’s license until he was 17. Then, last summer when he was a counselor in training at Camp Susan Curtis and looking for a project to work on, the idea of flying came back to him.

Without telling him, his mother went ahead and signed him up for an introductory flying lesson at Twitchell’s Airport in Turner so that on the day after he came back from camp, he was taking off.

“He was a natural,” veteran pilot and instructor Tom O’Connell said. “You can usually tell right off if somebody has the skill set to fly. It has a lot to do with hand-to-eye coordination, and confidence. This kid has it.”

O’Connell, an instructor at Twitchell’s, has been flying for 58 years and has instructed hundreds of students.

O’Connell likes to train all his new pilots in a “tail dragger.” Small planes either have a center landing wheel under the nose or under the tail. Those with a wheel under the tail are called tail-draggers.

“The tail-draggers are harder to steer and land. It’s a skill all pilots should have, like learning to use a manual transmission instead of an automatic when first learning to drive. We also have trees that run right up to the runway, and nobody in a control tower telling you what to do. Learning to fly here makes it a piece of cake to land just about anywhere.”

On the morning of his 17th birthday he got his private pilot’s license.

When he’s not focused on flying, Jordan is an honor student at Oxford Hills Comprehensive High School, plays guitar and saxophone, makes movies and is interested in all types of new media. 

The next project he is considering will be to learn how to fly a helicopter, but his long-range plans after graduating from high school are to go on to get his commercial pilot license.

“Some day, I hope to pilot a 747. It may sound strange to most people, but I feel more comfortable and safer flying a plane than driving down the road in a car.”

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