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.
The plan was simple getting kicked out of the house by Caz and go for a solo bimble - first to remind myself which way up KK goes, then meet Jack later for a proper flight. I haven't seen Jack since November, and he's been off doing his ATPLs/CPLs whatknots because apparently more exams is what every pilot needs. Lots of catching up to do, most of it in the air. Caz had the lurgy so no peanuts on this flight.
A neighbourhood in Seattle called Laurelhurst has successfully restricted helicopter landings at the local hospital. Seattle Children's Hospital, to be specific. The complaint? The helicopters are too noisy.
Today is May the 4th. Star Wars Day. The day I get reminded that I used to do something a bit ridiculous before I learned to fly something a bit ridiculous.
Before KK, there was R2-TK.
For seven years my weekends weren't about Class G airspace and PPR forms. They were about screen accuracy, white panels, and a small blue-and-silver droid I'd built in my garage. I was a member of the UK Garrison, the British branch of the 501st Legion. And I was part of R2 Builders UK, the people who make astromech droids in their spare bedrooms because that is apparently a thing that grown adults do.
Caz was in on it too. She trooped as a Jawa. Please don't ask. Just please, don't ask me how bad shopping gets when your wife is a Jawa.
Some call it costuming, some call it cosplay. The technical term is trooping. Or, to put it mildly, dressing up as a plastic spaceman in a stifling hot uncomfortable costume you can barely see out of. Sounds like a PA28. Trust me, not much difference.
Then I grew up, a bit, and built a droid. Well, why not?
If you've never come across them, the 501st Legion is a global volunteer costuming group. Stormtroopers, Imperial officers, Sith, bounty hunters, the whole roll-call. The UK Garrison is the British branch, and there are over 400 of us across England and Wales. Worldwide, the Legion has 12,000+ members in more than 100 countries. The deal is simple. You build a screen-accurate costume, you turn up, and you spend your weekends being a friendly face inside a slightly menacing helmet.
It's a charity-driven outfit. Hospitals, hospices, military veterans, kids' wards. Hundreds of thousands of pounds raised every year. The dressing-up is the hook. The actual point is the fundraising and the kids. I've watched a child light up at the sight of an Imperial officer the same way I imagine they would at a real-life pilot. The costume is a permission slip for joy.
I built three costumes. A Stormtrooper first. Then a Biker Scout. And R2-TK. I trooped, and I was part of the command team for a stretch. So I wasn't just inside the helmet, I was helping co-ordinate where the helmets went. It was good work. Properly good. The kind of weekend that leaves you tired and pleased with what you have achieved.
Trooping with the UK Garrison took me to a lot of places. Four stand out, for very different reasons.
The first was Great Ormond Street Hospital. If you've never been involved in a GOSH visit, the only thing I can tell you is that it changes the way you think about volunteering. You walk in expecting it to be hard. It is. You walk out wondering how the staff there do it every day, all year, without the costume to hide behind. That one stays with you.
The second was a private screening at the BFI on London's Southbank. ILM staff and their families. R2-TK was invited along. The moment that sticks with me wasn't the screening itself. It was a chap who came over to say hello. Turned out he'd spent three years 3D modelling an R2 unit for work, and this was the first time he'd seen one in the flesh. Three years of pixels meeting 462 days of aluminium and paint. He was delighted. I was, frankly, a bit lost for words.
The third was a Rogue One screening at Farnborough Airfield in August 2019. R2-TK rolling around inside the airfield's old hangar framework, with a full Rogue One lineup. Stormtrooper, Shoretrooper, Death Trooper, Vader, Jyn Erso, Leia, an X-Wing pilot. Caz was there too, crewing rather than in costume that day. The setting did most of the work. Those exposed steel arches against an evening sky, full troop assembled underneath, R2 in the middle of the line. One of those nights where you stop and think: how did I get here, and why am I dressed like this, and would I change anything? No.
The fourth was a PR shoot for Essex & Herts Air Ambulance at North Weald in April 2022. Their AW169 on the apron at last light, full troop in front of it. Stormtroopers, an X-Wing pilot, a Scout Trooper, Chewbacca, R2-TK in the middle. The pilot flying the aircraft that evening is a friend of mine, which made the night a bit special in a way I won't write about here. He knows. Standing on a HEMS pad at dusk with a screen-accurate astromech in front of a helicopter that genuinely saves lives is not a normal Tuesday. It's a long way from a hospital ward, and at the same time it isn't.
Four highlights. One because of who you help. One because of who walks up to you. One because of where you happened to be standing. One because of who was flying.
The droid build is its own discipline. R2 Builders is a global group of obsessives who create screen-accurate astromechs from anything from machined aluminium parts to scrap from the kitchen, then painted to spec, with working domes and lights and sound. Some are radio-controlled. All of them take longer to build than you tell yourself they will when you start.
R2-TK is mine. He took 462 days to build. Slightly longer than waiting for a fuel stop at a busy field on a sunny Saturday, although it sometimes felt about the same.
The Elstree visit was during a charity open day. Many thanks to Elstree for letting us do that. They didn't have to. They could have looked at a man asking permission to take a four-foot droid onto an active airfield and quietly closed the door. They didn't.
R2 was, as I said in the Short, looking for a spare X-Wing. We didn't find one. He had to settle for a Cessna 172. A dream come true for a little astromech, all the same.
There was a stretch where the trooping and the flying were running in parallel. Saturday in costume at a hospital event. Sunday at Elstree with an instructor wondering why my radio calls had a slight Imperial cadence. Fun while it lasted, but something had to give.
Seven years was a good streak. Long enough to mean something, short enough not to outstay its welcome. I didn't fall out with the 501st or the R2 community. Both are still some of the best volunteer organisations I've come across. But Caz and I run a business together, and a business doesn't pause for charity events or build deadlines. The business comes first. Family flows from that. Then there's flying, which isn't a casual hobby. You know this if you're reading a UK GA blog. It eats weekends. It eats money. It eats the part of your brain that used to be reserved for other things. There wasn't room for everything.
Caz traded the Jawa robes for Disney vlogging. I traded the Stormtrooper helmet for a headset and a 1/5 of a Cessna 172. Different obsessions, similar brains.
So I stepped back. R2-TK still exists. The Stormtrooper and the Biker Scout are still in their boxes. I just don't get them out most weekends now. KK does.
Here's the thing nobody warned me about. The two hobbies are basically the same hobby.
R2 Builders rewards obsessive attention to detail. So does flying. Trooping rewards procedure, calm, and the ability to do the same thing the same way every time. So does flying. Charity events teach you to communicate clearly when you're hot and tired and your visibility is rubbish. Pretty handy, that one.
Same brain. Different uniform.
The difference is that one of them lets you go to Le Touquet for lunch.
These days I'd rather chase a £100 burger than a Death Star plan. Both involve a lot of preparation, an early start, and a moment where you wonder if you've thought it through properly. Only one of them gets you out of the country before lunchtime.
This isn't a flying lesson. I'm not qualified to give one. It's a small bit of context for anyone who follows the channel and wonders where the brain space for self-deprecating videos and overthought landings comes from.
It came from seven years of building things that didn't have to fly, before I started learning to fly something that does.
The brand thesis I keep coming back to is this. We never stop learning, and the day we do is the day we should stop flying. I learned to build a droid. I learned to wear a Stormtrooper helmet without complaining. I learned to stand still while a child asked me very serious questions about the Empire.
Now I'm learning how to land a Cessna without bouncing.
Same brain. Different obsession.
May the 4th be with you.
It seems that British Airways have updated their conditions of carriage. Passengers can no longer film, photograph or livestream cabin crew or other passengers without consent. Break the rule and you could be off the plane at the next landing, with your remaining flights cancelled, and the local authorities involved. KLM have done this for years. Virgin too. I fly Virgin regularly and the cabin announcement on every flight asks you to get permission before filming anyone else on board. So this isn't new. BA are just catching up.
My first reaction was that this should never have needed writing down. It's basic courtesy. You don't point a camera at a stranger, or at the family in the row across, without asking. We all know this on the ground. Somehow at 35,000 feet a chunk of the travelling public seem to forget.
A quick word on the law, because it gets misunderstood. In the UK, filming in a public place where there's no reasonable expectation of privacy is generally legal. I used to do photography professionally, so I've spent a fair bit of time thinking about this.
But "public place" is more nuanced than people assume. It isn't just anywhere the public can walk into. Sports stadiums, theatres, theme parks, gig venues, even some shopping centres. They're all ticketed or conditional spaces, and the conditions of entry routinely include filming restrictions. Next time you go to a match or a concert, have a read of the back of your ticket. You'll be surprised. An aircraft cabin is the same logic. You bought a ticket. The conditions came with it. The airline gets to set the rules.
And even where filming is legal, "legal" and "fine" aren't the same thing. Kids are the obvious one. Just because you can point a lens at a stranger's child in a park doesn't mean you should.
Then I caught myself. Because as a vlogging PPL holder, I point a camera at people in aeroplanes for a living. Sort of. So what's my code?
It's pretty simple. I always ask instructors before I film a flight with them. Always. And if they say not, then I don't ask why. I can understand a working instructor not wanting to be all over YouTube. They're doing a job. The camera is my hobby. Those two things don't get to outrank each other.
There's a softer version of the same rule for training flights. If I'm there as a student rather than as the pilot in command, the camera goes away unless we've talked about it first. I'm there to learn. The instructor is there to teach. Neither of us is there to make content. That bit matters.
Pilot in Command (PIC) and with my own passengers it's a different story. KK is my plane. Well a fifth of it is. I film what I like in her. And Caz is wifey. We film each other all the time. That's just the deal.
The BA story is being framed as a crackdown. It isn't really. It's just a big airline writing down what Virgin have been saying over the PA for years. Ask first. Accept no. Move on.
If you're a student pilot reading this and you're tempted to stick a GoPro on the dash for your next lesson, here's the only advice I'll give. Ask. If the answer is yes, brilliant. If the answer is no, that's the end of it. You'll learn more without the camera anyway.
Written in the cafe at Elstree, opposite Caz and her Snowgies. She runs Addicted to Disney. We're both in the content game. She didn't ask before I took this photo. She's wifey. That's the deal.
I get grief for having a camera in my cockpit. Not constantly, but enough. The implication being that any camera mounted in a C172 doing circuits at Elstree is somehow reckless and dangerous. A distraction. An unnecessary risk. We are all going to die. Well I am.
And then this week a story broke that made me feel considerably better about myself.
In December 2021 a South Korean Air Force pilot caused a mid-air collision between two F-15K fighter jets. Not because of a mechanical failure. Not because of bad weather. Because he was taking selfies on his phone. On his final flight before a transfer he told his wingman he wanted some commemorative photos. The wingman offered to help. Our man then pulled an unannounced manoeuvre at 578 km/h in formation to get a better angle.
The two jets collided, but both landed safely. The total repair bill came to around $600,000 - ouch. The South Korean Air Force apologised publicly this week when the story finally came out, three and a half years after it happened.
My GoPros are mounted on engineered mountings. They records automatically. I generally don't touch them in flight. It has never once caused me to pull an unannounced manoeuvre at 578 km/h.
I feel slightly vindicated.
The full story is worth a read if you want the details. CNN covered it well: https://www.cnn.com/2026/04/23/asia/south-korea-fighter-jet-selfies-scli-intl And yes, the cartoon was made specially. by AI. The smug little Cessna in the corner is absolutely intentional.
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.
