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.
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.
Flying near a major international airport like Heathrow in a little Cessna C172 is one of those things that sounds more terrifying than it is. And also exactly as terrifying as it sounds. Both things are true at the same time.
Read more: RESTRICTED AIRSPACE :: Real Pilot POV Near Heathrow
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
I quit. There. Not something I find easy to say.
I started my IR(R) with the best of intentions. The Instrument Rating (Restricted) IRR, felt like the logical next step. Be able to fly in worse weather. Be a safer pilot. All the reasons we all give. And then life, work, costs and if I'm honest a growing sense of being overwhelmed got in the way and I stopped.
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.
This was our second attempt to fly KK to Le Touquet. The first didn't go well either. You'd think that would have been a sign.
Read more: Do you wish to Declare an Emergency? Our flight to Le Touquet has issues
We flew our 1977 Cessna to the Alps. And the French military got involved.
That sentence pretty much sums up the trip out to Aero Friedrichshafen 2023 and I'm still not entirely sure how it happened. What started as a straightforward cross-country to one of the world's biggest GA airshows turned into one of those flights where you're constantly wondering what's going to happen next.
Aero Friedrichshafen is worth the effort. If you're a GA pilot and you've never been, put it on the list. 860 exhibitors. Aircraft you'll never see at a UK airshow. The kind of flying culture that makes you realise how hard UK GA has it by comparison. Oh, and a Zeppelin. An actual Zeppelin flying overhead. That alone is worth the fuel.
The show floor video is the calmer of the two. Less French military, more wandering around trying not to spend money on things I don't need. Mostly unsuccessful on that front.
Two videos, one trip, and a reminder that GA flying doesn't have to stop at the English Channel. KK is perfectly capable of getting you somewhere interesting if you're willing to plan properly and accept that nothing will go entirely to plan.
Worth it. Every bit of it.
