✈️ Zero Flights

About

4 min read

Contact

My Backstory

Growing up in Taiwan, flying is something that I thought I’ll never be able to do. It wasn’t seem accessible outside of trying to be an airline or military pilot, which I’m not particularly interested in. Taiwan, while being a tiny country, we do have three major international airlines (EVA, Starlux, China Airlines), but we don’t really have a flight school until 2014. While we do have some ultralight and light sport activities in recent years, general aviation is still fairly uncommon. This goes to say, being able to fly an airplane by myself just never really crosses my mind growing up.

Fast forward, coming to the US, getting to know a few coworkers who are pilots, and took me up in the sky. It made me realize that this might be something that I can actually do. However, taking that first step is scary. A lot of flight school and instructors want you to call them to start the conversation. That, plus me knowing next to nothing about aviation, makes it a nightmare for an introvert like me to think about calling around to start. It wasn’t until one time, a coworker took me up flying, and we happened to ran into his instructor after flight. Only then I took the chance to setup a time with his instructor and started my training.

And that is why, I want to document things I have experienced as I learned how to fly and now flying. Making it more accessible to everyone.

What I love about flying

Flying is scratching a lot of itches for me, it is simultaneously freeing and engaging in different areas.

Freedom

I love riding motorcycle and what I love about it is that it frees you from the moment. I usually just pick a general area that looked fun (read: windy mountain roads) then just hop on the bike to go. You just let the road leads you, focus on riding and enjoy the moment.

Flying in a good day is a lot like that. We in the US has a lot of freedom to simply fly anywhere we want! A lot of friend asked me if we need to file a flight plan or request an approval to go somewhere and land at an airport, the answer is usually no! You can just take off and go somewhere in most cases! Even in busy airspaces like SF Bay Area where coordination with ATC is highly recommended. In the few cases that it is required, they are usually super helpful and accommodating! (If you’re a pilot reading this, yes, get flight following every single time!)

Engaging

I’m a software engineer by trade and amateur hardware tinkerer. Aviation has a lot of those. (I was very excited to see a G1000 kernel panic once 🤣, granted it was on the ground …) The modern advanced avionics is fun to understand deeply and use effectively. Understanding how ADS-B, WAAS works or how your avionics works and communicated between its LRUs is really fun for my inner nerds. It gets even more fun into experimental aircrafts where you have much more freedom to actually get your hands dirty to work on it directly.

On the other side, the highly procedural nature of IFR flying is also really cool. It feels like someone wrote programs (Departure, Arrival, Approach Procedures) and you, the pilot, are the one executing it. ATC gives you commands and orchestrates everything behind the scene while you follow the procedure to the letter. As you trust the system and you brake out of the cloud… You see the runway right where it is supposed to be for you to land on, it is super satisfying to see everything just works.