From Maui to New England

I grew up in Hawaii with no path to aviation. I built one anyway.

First intro flight at Kahului Airport, 2018

Where it Started

I took my first intro flight in a C172SP out of Kahului Airport in 2018. I knew right away what I wanted to do.

I didn't grow up around airplanes. Nobody in my family flew. I moved to New England, built a software engineering career, and started flight training alongside it — two things I've been doing in parallel ever since.

Private pilot checkride, RV-12 at Portsmouth International

First Solo - First Checkride

My first solo was in the RV-12 out of Portsmouth International in February 2024. That summer I passed my private checkride in 50 hours.

Flying the Cirrus SR20

Everything After

From there I earned my instrument rating, high-performance endorsement, AGI, IGI, and Part 107. I joined Skyhaven Flying Club and flew the Cessna 172 and Cirrus SR20 through every season New England has to offer.

Seaplane rating add-on

Seaplane, Commercial, & Beyond

I earned my single-engine sea add-on, then completed an accelerated commercial program at Laconia Flight Academy in 43 days. Now I'm finishing my CFI at CHI Aerospace in Portsmouth, NH, with plans to pursue the CFII after that.

The Engineering Side

7+ years in IT and five as a software engineer — including two building pilot-facing tools at Jeppesen ForeFlight.

At ForeFlight I built the content delivery system, contributed on the community events feature, and designed the server-side education video layer for the mobile app. Earlier I built data pipelines and mentored engineering teams at Arkatechture, and developed full-stack web applications at Frontdesk. Today I also work as a flight simulator technician at Flight Sim Coach, supporting pilots and enthusiasts running X-Plane 11 and 12.

Documentation, standardization, scheduling systems, managing technical complexity under pressure — that's the engineering work, and it's the same discipline that makes a good pilot. I lean on both.

Night flight over New England
Sharing a flight over New England

Why I Fly

Soon after I started taking passengers up over New England, I realized the best part of aviation isn't flying. It's showing someone else what it looks like from up there. That's the part of flying I love most.

Flying and engineering pull from the same place — both reward precision, systems thinking, and the work it takes to make hard things routine.

Outside the Flight Deck

I live in New Hampshire with my wife and our daughter. When I'm not flying I'm usually building something — I wrote the software that generated this website. I'm a member of AOPA, the Skyhaven Flying Club, and a subscriber to every aviation podcast I can find. Here's my 2025 ForeFlight Recap.