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Southwest Airlines rewarded a five-year-old boy with a VIP tour of its Dallas headquarters after he spotted a mistake in the airline’s company training manual. Pre-kindergartner William Hines was going through the document when he noticed a discrepancy involving two terrain monitors that did not match.
The story eventually made its way to Southwest CEO Bob Jordan, who invited William on a special VIP trip to the carrier’s headquarters. William and his family were given a behind-the-scenes tour of Southwest’s pilot training facilities, where the young boy would meet with pilots and instructors, and even sit inside a full-motion flight simulator.
Boy Spots Southwest Training Manual Discrepancy
As reported by 9News, William, who is currently a student at Campbell Early Learning Center in Jefferson County, Colorado, has demonstrated a fascination with all things aviation, spending his days studying various materials, models and watching airplanes. With the ambition of becoming an airline pilot when he grows up, William has also spent a lot of time at Rocky Mountain Metro Airport, a general aviation airport located near Broomfield, and was connected with a pilot via a chance meeting at a local book fair.
The Southwest pilot, named as Josh, enjoyed a two-hour visit (while in his pilot uniform) to William’s home, where he took the young boy through various charts, documents and other aviation-related activities. William was looking through Southwest’s company training manual — which is the airline’s comprehensive instructional guide for pilots — when he noticed a discrepancy in a section on the aircraft’s terrain displays. The two terrain monitors were supposed to represent the same system and match in appearance, but Southwest’s diagrams had mismatched them, with one zoomed in further than the other. As explained by William’s mother, Amber Hines,
“One was very, very zoomed out while the other one was zoomed in. He was able to identify the fact that these should look the same, but they looked different because one was drastically zoomed out from the other one.”
VIP Tour Of Training Facilities
Hines posted about the experience on her social media, and the story spread among her friends, including one who had coincidentally just begun a new job at Southwest. This friend told her manager about it, who passed it up until it reached Southwest CEO Jordan, who personally invited William and his family to the carrier’s HQ in Dallas, Texas, offering him a one-in-a-lifetime VIP tour of its on-site training center.
It is here that many of the airline’s huge pilot workforce undergo their initial training and recurrent training, and William got a first-hand look at the requirements of becoming a commercial pilot. Southwest put William and his family up in a hotel before the special day, where William met with pilots, instructors and other employees as a VIP guest of the airline.
The likely highlight of his trip would have been an experience inside a full-motion flight simulator, which Southwest uses to train its Boeing 737 pilots. William was accompanied in the Level D simulator by an instructor called Chris, and the experience will be one he will never forget.
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Southwest Clarifies There Was No Error
Given the importance that Southwest’s training manual holds, an error would have been quite a blunder on the part of the airline. However, Southwest has clarified that there was “no error in the training manual,” but instead a discrepancy in the way the terrain displays were illustrated, with each shown at a different zoom level.
Hines describes her son as a “details guy” who is always noticing little things, and Southwest was clearly impressed with his enthusiasm and eye for detail. The low-cost airline recently revealed it is looking to hire up to 900 pilots this year, as well as promoting over 600 of its current pilot workforce to become captains.
