The youngest Dragon Lady

At nine she was a U2 and stratosphere expert, at sixteen she went solo and at seventeen she got her PPL. Ellie Carter shares her inspiring story with us, and offers some suggestions on how we can attract more young people to GA

- Pat Malone

You may have heard of Ellie Carter−certainly down in the south-west of England she is spoken of in awed tones by veteran aviators who have never seen anybody like her before. Just seventeen years old and a qualified PPL since her birthday, she has a tailwheel endorsement and flies a 1943 Piper Grasshopper in D-Day markings, as well as dabbling with a Super Decathlon, a Citabria, a Chipmunk and several nose-dragger types. As a maths and science student she understands the physics of flight better than some of us who’ve been in the game for decades, and a career in some form of aviation certainly beckons.

Such is the level of her comprehension, and the maturity with which she puts her points across, that it’s easy to forget she has not yet come to the fork in the road where she must decide which path to follow. She’s studying for her A-levels at a specialist maths and science school in Exeter and hasn’t settled on which universities to apply to, but it looks like it’s going to be aeronautics and astronautics, or aeronautical engineering. Already she’s been approached by easyJet, who’ve put her on their mentoring programme, but the whole world of aviation stands before her−she could go civil, go military, engineering, design, or to the edge of space and beyond…but right now she’d really like to fly stunts for the movies.