A 5-year-old spotted what pilots flipped right past

William Hines is five years old, lives in Arvada, Colorado, and is fairly certain he is going to be a pilot. The case grew stronger last month, when a commercial pilot named Josh visited the family home in full uniform and spent two hours walking the boy through aeronautical charts. As a parting gift, Josh left a Southwest training manual, the dense technical guide pilots use to learn aircraft systems. William started flipping through it and, within minutes, found something. "I discovered that two terrain monitors did not match. They did not match at all," he said. One diagram was zoomed in, the other zoomed far out. Southwest later confirmed it was not an actual error, just a difference in zoom levels that a five-year-old happened to notice while adults flipped past. The story reached CEO Bob Jordan, who invited the family to the airline's Dallas headquarters, where William sat inside a full-motion flight simulator. He explained his ambition plainly. "I love flying. I don't have to walk 7,000 miles."