Recent news about airplanes falling out of the sky is enough to turn anyone into a nervous flyer, but Michael Domb hasn’t been deterred from achieving his dream of becoming a pilot.

Michael Domb learning on a Cessna 172

Domb said he already has the required number of in flight hours to go solo – fly without an instructor – but  he’ll still have to wait a few months before he can.

Legally, you have to be 14 years old to fly by yourself with a student pilot licence, and Domb is just 13.

But by the summer, he expects to pass the test to get his student licence, which would also make him the youngest Canadian, and youngest Israeli, student pilot.

Domb, a Fieldstone Day School student who often travels to Israel to visit family, said aviation has always been part of his life.  

“My dad was working for the U.S. for NASA for the Apollo missions. He’s a rocket scientist. He also used to fly,” Domb said, adding that his father, Uriel Domb, is president and CEOof Telespace Inc., a satellite consulting company.

He said his uncle is also a pilot who owns a small, single engine plane.

“I started flying when I was 12… We used to go up and have some fun in the air.”

Domb said he started flying with an instructor last year and began going to a pilot ground school, where he learned   aviation basics. After that, he was assigned to a unit and an instructor who taught him to fly.

He said it was a surprise to him and many others that flying came so naturally to him.

“Ever since I was little, I flew on computer simulators, but it came pretty quickly to me in the airplane. I did pretty well, and I progressed pretty fast,” he said.

He said he’s been learning to fly with Canadian Flyers, a pilot training firm, at the Markham Airport, where he learns on a Cessna 172.

“Markham has a really small runway. It is very narrow, so it makes flying different and hard. If you can learn to land there, you can land pretty much anywhere, because it’s so small. And if you think about flying a plane at 130 kilometres an hour and coming to land on a seven-foot wide runway, it’s pretty hard. When you have to factor in wind and snow, or rain on a slippery runway, it can get pretty complicated,” Domb said.

With 15 hours of flying already under his belt – three more than the minimum requirement – Domb is counting down the days until his 14th birthday in June, when he is legally able to fly solo as a student.

He said his instructor evaluates him every time he flies and said he’s ready to go it alone because he knows how to take off, fly and land.

“Part of the flight training is doing spins. You basically fly up to 6,000 feet, and then you stall the plane and it goes into a spin and you spin for a couple thousand feet and the plane is actually going pretty fast, but it only lasts for about three seconds. When you pull out, it’s a lot of fun.”

Although Domb enjoys the thrill of flying, he takes it very seriously, especially in light of recent plane crashes in Buffalo and Amsterdam.

“As we have recently seen with the Bombardier plane crash in Buffalo, flying can be quite dangerous. It is a lot of fun, and a great experience, but when people treat aircraft lightly, accidents happen,” Domb said.

“Last year, when I worked as a flight dispatcher at Markham, people would rent airplanes and takeoff without doing any [safety] checks. Not only is this breaking the law, but it is extremely dangerous. These are aircraft, not cars.”

Domb added that when he turns 16, he plans to take the written exam and flight test required to obtain a pilot’s license, and then he’ll be able to fly a plane on his own with passengers.

But his ambitions don’t end there.

Domb said that when he turns 18, he plans to make aliyah and join the Israeli Air Force. He said part of the reason he wants to serve in Israel rather than Canada is because he feels more of a connection with the Jewish state, and he has a friend who died two years ago serving in the war in Lebanon.

But beneath it all, he simply loves to fly.

“I mean, it’s complicated, and not every flight is the same – it’s always different… I just love flying as a whole.”