William Hines is five years old, lives in Arvada, Colorado, and is pretty sure he’s going to be a pilot. Based on his attention to detail, the airlines might want to get in line early. Hines’ love of aviation started absurdly early. His mother, Amber Hines, said that even during “tummy time” as a baby, he was studying how wheels moved and taking apart toy cars to figure out how they worked, reported KGNS News. As he got older, the family made regular trips to Rocky Mountain Metro Airport so he could watch planes take off and land. An obsession or a calling? His obsession went to another level when Amber connected with a staff member at her daughter’s school whose spouse was a commercial pilot. That pilot, named Josh, showed up at Hines’ house in full uniform and spent two hours going over aeronautical charts and talking through the details of commercial flying. As a parting gift, Josh handed Hines a Southwest company training manual, the comprehensive guide pilots use to learn aircraft systems, safety procedures, and operational protocols. William started flipping through it. Within minutes, he found something. “I discovered that two terrain monitors did not match. They did not match at all. One side’s farther and one side’s closer,” William said. His mom explained what he’d caught. “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.” To be clear, Southwest later looked into it and clarified that there wasn’t an actual error in the manual. The two terrain displays simply showed different zoom levels, and Amber confirmed it “wasn’t an error, just that the child’s eagle-eyed attention to detail caught two terrain gauges in the training manual that didn’t match.” But that’s almost beside the point. A newly minted five-year-old looked at a dense, technical document full of cockpit instrumentation and immediately noticed that two diagrams weren’t consistent with each other. Most adults would have flipped right past it. View this post on Instagram A special VIP tour A family friend who worked for Southwest passed the story up the chain, and it eventually reached Southwest CEO Bob Jordan. The airline was impressed enough to invite Hines and his family to its Dallas headquarters for a full VIP tour of the pilot training facility. Hines got to meet team members, including a simulator pilot named Chris and a staffer named Earl. The highlight, predictably, was getting to sit inside a full-motion flight simulator, the kind real pilots train on. The family says it’s a memory they’ll never forget. When asked why he wants to be a pilot, Hines gave an answer more thoughtful than most adults could manage about their own career goals. He wants to “transport people to a place and not just myself, like 140 people to a place.” He also offered the simplest possible case for aviation: “I love flying. Airplanes get you from place to place a lot faster than a car does. I don’t have to walk 7,000 miles.” Amber summed up her son pretty well, saying, “What 5-year-old knows that? But I also know that he’s a details guy, and he notices things. He listens to everything, and he really absorbs information.” He’s all set The Internet, as usual, had jokes. “Buddy is going to have airlines sending headhunters for him when he gets out of flight school,” one commenter wrote. Another added, “This is what they mean when it says 10+ years of experience.” The post A pilot gave this 5-year-old a training manual. Minutes later he spotted something adults miss. appeared first on Upworthy.