A 16-year-old with New Zealand roots has flown into the record books, becoming the youngest supported pilot to fly around the globe.<\/p>\n
Byron Waller \u2013 who has Kiwi parents and spent a lot of his young life here \u2013 buzzed around the world in 67 days, stopping in around 20 countries and territories.<\/p>\n
The Queensland-based teen started and finished his journey in Brisbane.<\/p>\n
He was accompanied by an instructor, but did all the flying himself, with some stints of up to 17 hours.<\/p>\n
Waller spoke to 1News during the final leg back to Brisbane from New Caledonia.<\/p>\n
“I wanted to do this just to show kids that their dreams are possible.”<\/p>\n
Byron has been passionate about flying since he was a child but, before becoming a pilot, he spent years of his youth in hospital, with severe rashes and fatigue.<\/p>\n
Last year, he was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease.<\/p>\n
“It feels weird to be able to do this, but also just to show people that their obstacles don’t define them.”<\/p>\n
At 14, Byron became the youngest person to fly around Australia with an instructor.<\/p>\n
While he loved being in the air, he told 1News he was looking forward to a bit more time on the ground.<\/p>\n
“It’s gonna be good to get home, get to my family, get to my dog,” he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A 16-year-old with New Zealand roots has flown into the record books, becoming the youngest supported pilot to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":79385,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[85,111,43,139,69],"class_list":{"0":"post-79384","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-zealand","8":"tag-australia","9":"tag-new-zealand","10":"tag-news","11":"tag-newzealand","12":"tag-nz"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79384","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=79384"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79384\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/79385"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=79384"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=79384"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=79384"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}