Last spring, more than 750 Southwest Airline Pilots mentored nearly 40,000 students through the airline's Adopt-A-Pilot program. Jack Mitchell will be a sixth-grader this fall at Mary Lillard Intermediate School in the Mansfield Independent School District in Texas. He participated in Adopt-A-Pilot through his school’s gifted-and-talented program and was taught by First Officer Justin Scott. Jack’s latest Southwest flight was in July to see his beloved St. Louis Cardinals play a home series. Thanks to our Pilots for inspiring students like Jack to aim high!
The Adopt-A-Pilot program was awesome! It taught me a lot about math, science and aviation. There were a lot of fun facts about aviation history, parts of an airplane and how an airplane flies.
My favorite part was the mileage plot. You can find the distance from one Southwest airport to any other Southwest airport, all on one piece of paper.
The coolest fact I learned was that in 2012 Southwest distributed 88 million bags of peanuts. There are approximately 15 peanuts in one bag, so Customers received 13.2 billion peanuts. I was stunned because when I was asked to guess how many bags, I said 100,000.
The Adopt-A-Pilot program was amazing in every way. Every kid should have the opportunity to enjoy it!
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