Learning to fly, one mistake at a time
Flying is simple isn't it? Take off. Land. Repeat. And obviously try not to get the two confused.
I started learning to fly in my early 50s and have never quite stopped being a student. This is my attempt at explaining why I fly. To myself, to Wifey, and hopefully to you.
I hope you find my antics honest, humorous and possibly even inspiring? That last one is a bit of a stretch, I know. But I love flying, and I love seeing others understand why I fly. If that encourages one person into the air, then I've succeeded.
My goal is simple: keep the number of landings equal to the number of takeoffs. And of course, try not to crash. I'm not an instructor - listen to them not some internet influencer (I was once called an 'up and coming YouTuber - Thanks Flyer Magazine'!!), All you will find here is just me and my experiences. Hopefully you can learn from them before I run out of luck, skill or cash.
Twenty thousand views. For a Short. About a crosswind landing at Elstree.
I genuinely didn't see that coming.
And for the pedantic it wasn't a 25 knot cross wind. It was below the demostrated cross wind limit for my 172. So no need to write to the CAA. again.
If you need to know how to calculate a crosswind, then ask your instructor.
Crosswind landings are probably the thing I get asked about most. Student pilots are terrified of them. Newly qualified pilots are terrified of them. I actually like them. I think. Crabbing in and then bashing the pedals at the right time to straighten up. It's a bit like stearing a boat across a river. Fun if you get it right. expensive on tires if you don't. I'm still not comfortable with the dropping wing method, It still seems to be counter intuative digging the wing into the ground... but 20000 views cannot be wrong!!
I've been making YouTube videos about learning to fly for a few years now. Long ones. Carefully edited ones. Videos where I've flown across Europe, landed at unfamiliar airfields, nearly declared emergencies, and generally made a complete mess of things in an entertaining way. My best long-form videos get a few thousand views if I'm lucky.
Then I posted a 17 second Short.
No flight. No aircraft. Just me pointing out a sticker on the oil flap telling us not to screw the oil cap on too tight - We seem to do that. It was a joke. It was silly. I posted it, forgot about it, and went to bed.
I woke up to notifications I'd never seen before. By the time I checked properly it had passed 5,000 views. It kept going. At the time of writing it's sitting at 187,000 views and still ticking.
I genuinely don't know exactly why it worked. My best guess is a combination of things. The title creates instant curiosity, you read it and immediately want to know what on earth it refers to. It's short enough that people watch it twice. And the reveal is satisfying without being clickbait.
What I do know is that it drove more subscribers in a week than several months of regular uploading. Most of them had never heard of WhiskeyAlphaPilot before. Some of them have stuck around.
The lesson I'm still trying to work out is how to repeat it. The honest answer is I'm not sure you can deliberately manufacture that kind of moment. But it's made me think differently about short-form content and the value of a good hook.
Sometimes the algorithm just decides. You don't always get to choose which video is your best one.
It was a Short. It was about 15 seconds long. And the title was, let's be honest, a slight exaggeration.
I didn't crash a real DA42 Twinstar. I crashed one in a simulator. But the title didn't say that. And YouTube didn't care. It got over 10,000 views - yes 10000 views, which for a Short on a channel my size at the time was a genuinely surprising number.
The interesting thing about that video is what it taught me about titles. I'd posted plenty of simulator content before with accurate, descriptive titles. Nobody watched them. The moment I framed it as a crash, people clicked.
There's something about the word crash that does something to people. I've noticed it consistently across my channel. Use the word crash in a title or thumbnail and the numbers go up. Every time. It doesn't matter if it's a simulator, a bad landing, or a near miss. The word itself is a magnet. People are drawn to it in a way that's hard to explain and slightly uncomfortable to admit you're exploiting.
I think it taps into something genuinely human. We watch dashcam compilations. We slow down past accidents. We want to see things go wrong because it's dramatic, and because somewhere in the back of our minds we're asking ourselves what we would have done differently. Aviation crashes carry extra weight because the stakes feel absolute.
When I started making videos I was very deliberate about avoiding what felt like clickbait. Sensational titles, misleading thumbnails, promising drama that wasn't there. It felt cheap and I didn't want WAP to be that kind of channel. That instinct is still right, I think. But the reality of YouTube in 2026 is more nuanced than simply avoiding clickbait.
YouTube isn't really an art form anymore. It's a science. The platform rewards specific behaviours and punishes others, and the metrics tell you exactly what's happening. Hook rate in the first three seconds. Average view duration. Click through rate on the thumbnail. Retention graphs that show you the precise moment people stopped watching and why. You can obsess over all of it, and plenty of creators do.
The crash title worked not just because of the word itself, but because it created a question in the viewer's mind that they needed to answer. That's the hook. The retention came because the video was short enough that leaving felt pointless. The click through rate was high because the thumbnail backed up the title. Every element was doing a job, even if I didn't fully understand that at the time.
The line I try to walk is psychological without being dishonest. Create curiosity, deliver on the promise, respect the viewer's time. Whether I always get that balance right is another question entirely. Only you know the answer to that!!
It has been 3 years to the day assuming you are reading this on December 22nd 2024, of my passing my PPL. Since then it has been a journey with ups and downs. Was it worth it? You will have to possibly watch the video to find out
My most popular long-form video. And it's about getting a landing badly wrong.
That tells you everything you need to know about my viewers.
People don't watch aviation content to see perfect landings. They watch it to see what happens when things go wrong and how the pilot deals with it. Or in this case, doesn't deal with it particularly well. And they they jump in the comments and scream about my lack of skills. From their armchair, with their 10 hours of Microsoft FlightSim.
I'll be honest. The landing in this video is not my finest hour. And instead of doing the sensible thing and going around, I kept going. That's the mistake. Right there. The go-around is always the right call when things aren't right on final. Always. It took me longer than I'd like to admit to really get that into my bones.
This video is the blueprint for what I want to do with a future series. Watch the footage back. Be honest about what happened. Explain what should have happened. No excuses, no blaming the wind, no pretending the aircraft did something unexpected. Just an honest look at what went wrong and why. I do it time and time again. How many times do you think I watched the video during the edit?
The comments were mostly kind which I really appreciated. A few weren't. That's YouTube. The people who found it useful are the reason it's worth making.
