RECORD-BREAKING PILOT BARRINGTON IRVING TELLS STUDENTS
TO LIVE OUT THEIR DREAMS AT CAREER DAY

As a high school student at Miami Northwestern Senior High, Barrington Irving was a football star being offered a full scholarship to the University of Florida. Then one day, a man approached him in a store and asked if he had ever thought about being a pilot.  That prophetic question made the Jamaican-born Irving consider the possibilities.

“The first thing I said was, ‘I’m not smart enough to fly an airplane!’” Irving told an auditorium full of enthusiastic students at Toussaint Louverture Elementary. But he was willing to explore and learn something different. He gave up the scholarship and never looked back.

The results were breaking seven speed records and becoming one of the youngest and the first black pilots to fly around the world solo.  “Apply yourself and do what your teachers tell you,” the 26-year-old Irving urged the kids.

Irving entertained the students with his blow-by-blow account of this famous flight, and imparted a few colorful anecdotes about huge sand spiders in Egypt and landing on a mile-long, frozen, Alaskan island.  Then the famous pilot engaged the students in a girls-vs.-boys game on the story he'd just told them.

Last July, Irving collaborated with Miami-Dade County Public Schools to present his dynamic “Build and Soar” project to students at George T. Baker Aviation School.  The project bridged education with the industry giving students project-based learning opportunities. The experiment ended with the Baker students building an aircraft from the ground up, which Irving flew three months later.

Talking to the 2nd-5th graders at Louverture, Irving urged them to study and explore other things in life. “It’s hard to do many things,” Irving said, “but you have to have goals and you have to have dreams."

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Photo attached:

Capt. Barrington Irving, center, with students from Toussaint Louverture Elementary School.

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