About the FlyBoy

The Fly Boy Growing up in the Willow Glen district of San Jose, California I was by no means a farmer or in a rural environment for that matter, but my grandmother did grow up on a farm, and she was always there as I grew up. Ninth child of ten, born and raised just after the turn of the twentieth century on a farm in Moran, Kansas. She imparted to me a bit of the “farmer mentality” she grew up with. You know where your food comes from, and how it got to the table. It’s not prepackaged from the meat & vegetable faerie.

The Midwestern ideals of family, friendship, and doing business were instilled in me from the beginning. Joining the Cub Scouts, I worked my way up through the ranks to Eagle Scout throughout my formative years reinforcing those values and developing a love of learning new skills in hands on environments. Friends and family know me as a Jon-of-all-trades; as such, I have accumulated experience in a broad array of subject areas from various construction skills to blacksmithing, bookbinding & preservation, media production, business, non-profit leadership, telecommunications, security/law enforcement, search and rescue, network and server administration, fiber arts, and a slew of other things too diverse and numerous to mention here. Over years of acquiring these skills I have found that widely diverse and seemingly unrelated skills often converge in the most interesting places and ways. It’s this desire for knowledge and new skills that eventually lead me to aviation.

As a scout I developed a love of maps and navigation; with a topographic map and a decent compass I’ll get you where you want to be. I had been using land navigation skills almost as long as I could remember, as a scout and in search and rescue and I wanted to expand on that knowledge. Marine navigation, coastal at least, was my next endeavor. Picking up some charts, navigation tools, and a good sighting compass I started reading books on marine navigation, refining my navigation skills.

The marine environment provided new challenges to the basic skills of land navigation, the addition of forces acting against, or enhancing travel made time/speed/distance calculations and fuel consumption much more complex, and interesting. I was having a lot of fun adding these skills to my repertoire. As I continued learning more about navigation it occurred to me that I was missing one of the mediums of travel, air. I had never even seen an aeronautical chart, this was a whole new area that could be covered.

As a child I had always wanted to fly, helicopters mostly, but I didn’t know anyone who was a pilot. A friend of my mothers was a Navy reservist assigned to a flight group stationed at Moffett Field Naval Air Station in Mountain View, California and he took me out to Hanger 2 with him on a duty shift, but he was a supply clerk in the aircraft maintenance department. Admittedly that dulled the initial awe of being there a bit. I had been to a couple of air shows at Moffett over the years, but that was the extent of my aviation experience.

One day while working for Bosch Tool Corp as a service tech I decided I wanted to learn about aviation navigation. At the time I hadn’t really considered learning to fly, I was just looking to add to my navigation knowledge. After work one day I headed over to the local General Aviation airport, Ried-Hillview (RHV) in San Jose, and dropped into the pilot shop, The Airport Shoppe. There were a lot of charts and other navigation materials but I wasn’t sure where to begin. Starting with the Pilots Handbook of Aeronautical Knowledge I began learning about aviation navigation and aviation in general.

The pile of books and charts got bigger and in just a couple of weeks it became obvious to me that I needed to put some of this new found knowledge into practice. After talking things over with my wife it was decided that I would take an introductory flight and see how that went. When I got home after the flight, April 22, 2003, I knew I had to pursue flying, I knew aviation was now a part of me.

There were several bumps in the road for me, but they were just that, bumps in the road. I had three flights under my belt before my first delay. I had to wait until September 2003 to get back in the air but by the end of October 2004 I had earned my Instrument Rating and a Commercial Pilot certificate as well as two Ground Instructor certificates. 2004 was an amazing year for me, I was flying a lot, hanging out at the Hayward Executive Airport (HWD) nearly everyday, even working as a ground instructor. Aviation had become a huge part of me.

In 2004 I heard about an organization, the EAA, the Experimental Aircraft Association. It turns out that there is a whole bunch of people building airplanes, all the time. I looked into EAA and joined the organization. I have wanted to build an airplane ever since.