User

After starting out instructing on yachts from a very young age, I shifted into airplanes and helicopters once the bank account allowed. I’m qualified as a Mechanical Engineer with an Executive Masters of Business Administration, and completed my commercial flying training whilst studying at university. My first flying job was conducting pax carrying aerobatic and formation flights in a Fighter Combat type operation on the CJ6-A. After working as a project engineer and pilot for a few years in Australia, an attempt to escape office life and combine my technical and flying backgrounds brought me to Germany, Europe. I was privileged here to be able to work with one of Germany’s top technical universities in the unmanned aircraft sector where we built autonomous tilt-wing aircraft. Here, I was also able to enter a training program for Introductory Flight Test Operations at DLR, Germany’s counterpart to NASA. I’m ATPL(A) and CPL(H), dual licensed under CASA and EASA at around 1500+ hours. I hold flight instructor, formation, low-level aerobatic and Multi-Engine Instrument Ratings. My current full-time work is as a flight instructor under the new UPRT regulations, training future transport pilots in Upset Recovery Situations and Aerobatics if they wish. Our platform is the Extra 330LX. I conduct Introductory Alpine Flying courses about twice per year or on demand, and enjoy a side gig reviewing newly built aircraft around Europe. This gives me the lucky advantage of being able to report on their flight characteristics for readers in Australia a few years before they hit the market back home.