The air travel industry was beginning to take Island Airways seriously.

An article had appeared in Airliner World about the new start up, and one of its executives, Adam Tait, had a positive hour and a half meeting with the director of Jersey Airport.

David Rich and Anita Dash from the same company – a subsidiary of the American Global Group – also had telephone conversations with a number of other industry players.

Although some were not that impressed, none of them would have guessed that the American Global Group, Island Airways, Tait, Rich, and Dash were all the same person – a seventeen year old boy with autism.

This should earn the lad a nod of respect from every entrepreneur who has had to make his company look bigger and better established than it really is in order to get his foot in the door.

After all, which of us, at some point, has not had to pretend that he is his own secretary or receptionist or both?

Yet the boy is in trouble. The British government – hopeless at dealing with drug dealers, terrorists, and gun crime – is at least determined to wipe out what it sees as the autistic menace.

However we should admire the boy’s initiative and ingenuity – both rare in British teenagers today.

As his father says, “If someone with little or no education who has extreme enterprise and talent could have it channelled in the right direction, what could they achieve for themselves and our country?”