I started flying at 15 and got my license at 24. Somewhere in those years, "learn to fly" quietly turned into something bigger. Build the airplane myself. Then use it to go see the country, one small runway at a time.
Why build one
I'm a builder. It's what I do with software, and it turns out airplanes hit the same nerve. You earn a particular kind of trust in a machine when you've torqued every bolt and run every wire yourself. Buying one finished would be faster. Faster was never the point.
I've landed on Van's Aircraft RV-14A - a two-seat, all-metal kit that's fast enough and tough enough to actually do the mission. There's a whole page on why that one.
The mission
Once it flies, the plan is easy to say and hard to finish: hit as many regional and backcountry airports as I can reach. The little fields. The grass strips. The airport diners, the fly-in pancake breakfasts, the towns you'd blow right past on the interstate. General aviation opens up a version of the country most people never see. I want as much of it as I can get.
Documenting it
None of it means much if it just lives in a logbook. So the other half of the project is telling the story.
A coffee-table book - photos and short essays from the airports, the people, the flying. The kind of thing that sits on a table and quietly pulls someone into a world they didn't know they were curious about.
And a YouTube channel - the build first, then the trips. Nothing slick. Just what broke, what I learned, and what it feels like to shut down the engine somewhere new with the whole day ahead of you.
Where it stands
Early. This is a years-long project, not a weekend one, and I'm fine saying that out loud. I'll document the build here as it happens, same as everything else on this site: what shipped, what broke, what I'd do differently. Start with the airplane.