Carson Stilson built his own Zenith Super Duty kit plane in two and a half years and about 1,200 hours, then flew it to Oshkosh. He shares what building an experimental aircraft really takes.

Carson never planned to build an airplane in his thirties. He did it anyway, while working full time and raising two young kids. He explains why he chose a Zenith over a tailwheel kit, why he did most of the build himself, and how he kept going through the slow stretches. One of those stretches came a few weeks in, when he accidentally threw away half his airplane's skins.

In this episode:

• Why Carson chose a Zenith: STOL performance, cost, and no ground-loop worries
• How the Zenith rudder workshop led him to buy the kit
• Builder Assist vs. building it yourself, and when to get help with the engine and avionics
• "90% done, 90% to go": wiring, final assembly, and the last six months
• Putting a Lycoming IO-390 on a Super Duty for high-density-altitude backcountry flying in Utah
• The DAR inspection, the first flight on July 4th, and flying to EAA AirVenture Oshkosh
• Why experimental and kit aircraft, along with MOSAIC, could be the future of personal aviation
• Carson's dream fleet: a bush plane, a 200-knot family hauler, and a show plane

Thinking about building a kit plane? Send this to the friend who keeps saying "someday."

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A Designated Pilot Examiner shares 5 tips to pass your checkride, plus the story of his engine failure and landing on Chicago's Lake Shore Drive at 3 PM on a Friday.

Johnny Ginley, a young DPE and fellow Ohio State aviation alum, explains what examiners see from the other side of the table. The advice applies to private, instrument, commercial, CFI, ATP, and type-rating checkrides. Many checkrides end before they even begin because of missing flight time, a bad endorsement, or aircraft paperwork that can't prove airworthiness.

In this episode:

• Logbook mistakes that disqualify applicants, and why airlines still want clean logbooks years later
• Proving airworthiness: inspections, ADs, and why a printed status sheet isn't enough
• "Know your numbers": why cruising at 2,300 RPM needs a reason behind it
• Don't force the flight: making a go/no-go call when the wind picks up on checkride day
• Don't force the landing, and the one maneuver where a go-around now counts as unsatisfactory
• Average checkride pass rates and how the ACS changed the CFI oral
• The throttle cable failure that put Johnny on Lake Shore Drive, and how he got back in the cockpit afterward

Got a checkride coming up? Send this episode to someone who needs it. You can read Johnny's full article in Pilot to Pilot Magazine.

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Our Sponsors
Please support the companies that support the show.

Aero Tow: The Aero Tow T2 moves tail draggers and medium twins up to 15,000 lbs. Pilot to Pilot listeners get $100 off with promo code PILOT100 at https://amigoaerotow.com

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Avemco Insurance: Pilot to Pilot listeners save 5%. Call (888) 635-4297 or visit:
Aircraft owners: https://avemco.com/4297-owner
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Allworth Airline Advisors: Watch "The Hot Seat," an on-demand webinar where airline benefits experts answer pilots' open enrollment questions. Register at https://allworthairline.com/justin

Steve Giordano left a senior captain seat at Allegiant to build Nomadic Aviation Group, one of the most trusted ferry operations in the business. He breaks down how a ferry flight actually gets quoted and flown — lessors, permits, DARs, tankering fuel at $18 a gallon — what trips really cost, the margins behind them, and what he looks for when contracting pilots. Plus the Alice Springs COVID runs, Equatorial Africa thunderstorms, and the operational failure in Korea he still calls his worst.

Pilot to Pilot Magazine — Volume 003 is out now. Get yours at pilottopilothq.com/mag

Sponsors — please support the people who support the show:

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• Textron Aviation — Built for lifelong aviators. Plan your next chapter at txtav.com/stepup

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Nik Fialka has watched pilots lose the job before they ever sat down.

The Spitfire Elite coach and Ready 4 Pushback host joins us to walk through his ten rules for the airline interview — five things to do, five things that'll sink you.

The first one starts tonight, not the week your application gets picked up. Nik's habit: after shutdown, open your notes app and write down one thing that happened on that flight. The disagreement with your instructor. The divert. The passenger you went out of your way for. Do it for a year and you'll never be the candidate staring blankly when someone asks for a conflict story.

We get into paperwork nobody wants to think about until they need it, and why a gap you find today can take months to fix. Logbooks, too — Nik's line is that your logbook is your dissertation: you don't just present it, you defend it. Cover page, totals that add up, no white-out, addendums for the errors you find. As one airline logbook reviewer told him, don't make me pull out a calculator.

Then the other half. Why hiding or shading your data ends the interview faster than you'd believe. Why adding a previously undisclosed failure after you've been invited is a very different conversation than adding a new type rating. The pilot whose expunged record still got him fired for failure to disclose. And the one Nik is best known for — the candidate in a conference room full of finalists who dropped an F-bomb at the wrong moment and never made it to the logbook review.

The bigger point underneath all of it: from the second you leave your house, you're being interviewed. Be good to the Uber driver, the gate agent, the hotel desk. Jobs get won and lost when you least expect it.

Pilot to Pilot Magazine — Volume 003 is out now. Get yours at pilottopilothq.com/mag

Sponsors — please support the people who support the show: • NEW SPONSOR ALERT I'd like to welcome AeroTow to the Pilot to Pilot sponsors! check out their AeroTow T2 Engineered for easier maneuverability, the AeroTow T2 is versatile for a variety of aircraft. Its universal cradle provides a seamless towing experience ( Pilot to Pilot listeners can save $100 by using the code in the podcast!) Avemco Insurance — Save 5% as a Pilot to Pilot listener. Call (888) 635-4297 or visit avemco.com/4297-owner (owners) or avemco.com/4297-non-owner (non-owners) • Learn more about the exciting innovations at Textron Aviation today… just go to TXTAV.com • Garmin — Plan, file, fly, log with the Garmin Pilot app • Allworth Airline Advisors — Register for their latest webinar at allworthfinancial.com/justin • Allworth Financial - https://allworthfinancial.com/airlines/lp/runway-for-retirement-webinar?utm_campaign=airlines+-+more+runway+for+retirement?lmls=Partner+Channel&lmld=Pilot+to+Pilot&ad_version=Social

In 1999, a handful of people gathered at a dusty Namibian airfield to meet two men flying weight-shift microlights around the world. One of them was Mike Blyth. Watching from the crowd was a boy who had never left the country, whose family couldn't afford much flying, and who had no real concept of where these men had come from — only that whatever they were doing, he wanted to do it too.

Twenty-five years later, JP Schulze has flown around the world himself, built the first Sling High Wing off the line — designed by the same Mike Blyth — and become one of the most distinctive filmmakers in aviation.

This one took a while to make happen. We finally met at Oshkosh this year, and JP is candid about being a naturally shy person who ended up with a career in front of a camera.

He grew up in Namibia with no art classes and no creative outlets, thinking in German and Afrikaans, teaching himself English from the Discovery Channel at eight years old. He was taking the controls of his dad's microlight at ten. He funded his first licence by free-diving for crayfish, selling snake venom, and restringing tennis rackets.

The around-the-world trip nearly didn't happen twice. Sponsors walked after a Cirrus ditched near Hawaii and the CAPS pull ran on every news channel — nobody wanted their logo on a small plane over an ocean. So JP and Louis Cole self-funded it, and JP is honest about what that cost: the fourteen-hour legs, the multi-hour shouting match somewhere between Fiji and Kiribati, and the weight of being responsible for a non-pilot's life for the first time.

In this episode:

• Meeting Mike Blyth in 1999 — and building his airplane twenty years later
• Growing up flying "sketchy" weight-shift trikes over the African bush
• Why Southern Africa has a GA scene almost nobody expects
• Moving to New Zealand at seventeen and rebuilding from scratch in a third language
• Meeting Louis Cole on a sand dune and having his life change in a day
• Signing with Discovery, then watching the money disappear
• What flying around the world actually took — and why he'd do it again
• Insisting on being the first to build the Sling High Wing, then helping write the manual
• Why he refuses to post weekly, and what that has cost him
• The sunglasses he built because a $350 pair costs $10 to make
• Why print still matters, and what we both think is at stake

We also recorded a second conversation about the around-the-world flight itself — that one is exclusive to the magazine, with the audio released free a year after publication.

Happy Flying,
Justin

Support JP - otavi.co best sunglasses for pilots

Pilot to Pilot Magazine — Volume 003 is out now. Get yours at pilottopilothq.com/mag

Sponsors — please support the people who support the show: • NEW SPONSOR ALERT I'd like to welcome AeroTow to the Pilot to Pilot sponsors! check out their AeroTow T2 Engineered for easier maneuverability, the AeroTow T2 is versatile for a variety of aircraft. Its universal cradle provides a seamless towing experience ( Pilot to Pilot listeners can save $100 by using the code in the podcast!) Avemco Insurance — Save 5% as a Pilot to Pilot listener. Call (888) 635-4297 or visit avemco.com/4297-owner (owners) or avemco.com/4297-non-owner (non-owners) • Learn more about the exciting innovations at Textron Aviation today… just go to TXTAV.com • Garmin — Plan, file, fly, log with the Garmin Pilot app • Allworth Airline Advisors — Register for their latest webinar at allworthfinancial.com/justin • Allworth Financial - https://allworthfinancial.com/airlines/lp/runway-for-retirement-webinar?utm_campaign=airlines+-+more+runway+for+retirement?lmls=Partner+Channel&lmld=Pilot+to+Pilot&ad_version=Social

Mark Woglom has bought and sold roughly a dozen airplanes in twenty-five years — a new Cessna 182 he learned to fly in, a Baron he never got comfortable in, a pressurized 414, a Cheyenne II XL, four separate Cirrus SR22s, a Vision Jet, a TBM 960, a Citation M2, and the CJ3+ he flies today. Six weeks ago he added an Icon A5, because you can't go sightseeing in a jet.

Along the way he built a framework for making the decision the rest of us agonize over.

In this episode we cover:

• The three F's — finances, features, and function — and why mission is the one most buyers skip
• The "fourth F": buying the wrong airplane, and how to avoid it
• Why he never trusts manufacturer range claims, broker enthusiasm, or forum consensus
• His normalized fuel reserve method for comparing aircraft honestly, apples to apples
• Real rules of thumb for insurance, capital cost, maintenance, and the ancillary costs that ambush new owners
• Why he took a five-year break from flying while still owning an airplane
• What changed when he decided to earn a type rating in his mid-fifties
• Why his wife's headset ended a turboprop purchase
• Never get plane poor — and why a fuel stop isn't the end of the world

Whether you're saving toward your first 172 or wondering whether the step up is worth it, this one's a masterclass in buying with your head instead of your heart.

Happy Flying,
Justin

Pilot to Pilot Magazine — Volume 003 is out now. Get yours at pilottopilothq.com/mag

Sponsors — please support the people who support the show: • NEW SPONSOR ALERT I'd like to welcome AeroTow to the Pilot to Pilot sponsors! check out their AeroTow T2 Engineered for easier maneuverability, the AeroTow T2 is versatile for a variety of aircraft. Its universal cradle provides a seamless towing experience ( Pilot to Pilot listeners can save $100 by using the code in the podcast!) Avemco Insurance — Save 5% as a Pilot to Pilot listener. Call (888) 635-4297 or visit avemco.com/4297-owner (owners) or avemco.com/4297-non-owner (non-owners) • Learn more about the exciting innovations at Textron Aviation today… just go to TXTAV.com • Garmin — Plan, file, fly, log with the Garmin Pilot app • Allworth Airline Advisors — Register for their latest webinar at allworthfinancial.com/justin • Allworth Financial - https://allworthfinancial.com/airlines/lp/runway-for-retirement-webinar?utm_campaign=airlines+-+more+runway+for+retirement?lmls=Partner+Channel&lmld=Pilot+to+Pilot&ad_version=Social

Pilot to Pilot Magazine — Volume 003 is out now. Get yours at pilottopilothq.com/mag

Sponsors — please support the people who support the show: • Textron Aviation — The Pipistrel Voyager is perfect answer for high utilization flight training, easy ownership and broader access to aviation • Avemco Insurance — Save 5% as a Pilot to Pilot listener. Call (888) 635-4297 or visit avemco.com/4297-owner (owners) or avemco.com/4297-non-owner (non-owners) • • Garmin — Plan, file, fly, log with the Garmin Pilot app • Allworth Airline Advisors — Register for their latest webinar at allworthfinancial.com/justin • Learn the Finer Points — Save 10% off your first year at learnthefinerpoints.com/justin. https://allworthfinancial.com/airlines/lp/runway-for-retirement-webinar?utm_campaign=airlines+-+more+runway+for+retirement?lmls=Partner+Channel&lmld=Pilot+to+Pilot&ad_version=Social

Kyle Skylaski had never been on an airplane — not even as a passenger — until his senior year of high school. A local orchardist flew him across Washington in a Cessna 172 so he could make a state playoff baseball game. He got there as the game started, changed in the car, and hit a three-run homer off a future big leaguer to win it.

That flight sent him to the Air Force Academy and into 23 years in the cockpit: F-15s at Holloman, F-16s as an aggressor during the fall of the Soviet Union, an exchange tour with the Navy in the F/A-18, and later a modified 727 as a test pilot for Raytheon.

In episode 366 we get into what sports actually teaches you about flying, why leadership is service and nothing else, the three C's every team needs, what it feels like at Mach 2 versus 300 feet and nine miles a minute, losing seven friends early in his career and what it changed about how he takes risk, and where electric and hybrid training aircraft might actually make sense.

Kyle's book, The Sky Less Traveled: The Maverick Life of Leadership, Resilience, and the Pursuit of Purpose, is on Amazon now, with the audiobook coming this fall.

In this episode: first flight over the Cascades • Air Force Academy football and gliders • pilot training at Laughlin, where half the class washed out • F-15 vs F-16 vs F/A-18 • the aggressor years • flying the 727 as a test pilot • the squadron bar, call signs, and crud • three things he'd tell anyone starting over

Pilot to Pilot Magazine — Volume 003 is out now. Get yours at pilottopilothq.com/mag

Sponsors — please support the people who support the show: • Textron Aviation — The Pipistrel Voyager is perfect answer for high utilization flight training, easy ownership and broader access to aviation • Avemco Insurance — Save 5% as a Pilot to Pilot listener. Call (888) 635-4297 or visit avemco.com/4297-owner (owners) or avemco.com/4297-non-owner (non-owners) • • Garmin — Plan, file, fly, log with the Garmin Pilot app • Allworth Airline Advisors — Register for their latest webinar at allworthfinancial.com/justin • Learn the Finer Points — Save 10% off your first year at learnthefinerpoints.com/justin. https://allworthfinancial.com/airlines/lp/runway-for-retirement-webinar?utm_campaign=airlines+-+more+runway+for+retirement?lmls=Partner+Channel&lmld=Pilot+to+Pilot&ad_version=Social

Pete Stavridis was nine years old, watching the Challenger explode on live TV, when he decided he was going to fly airplanes. No pilots in the family. No money for it. So he enlisted in the Navy out of high school in 1995 — not the optimal path to fighters — flew P-3 Orions as an enlisted aircrewman on counter-drug ops over Panama and Colombia, and worked his way into a commission. He selected #1 out of T-34s, got the Super Hornet, and flew combat over Iraq and Afghanistan.

Now he's an Airbus first officer (by design), an FAA examiner with roughly 700 checkrides behind him, an aircraft management guy specializing in the Piaggio, and he runs upset recovery training in the L-39. He also raced at Reno in the gold jet class at 500 mph, four to six feet off another airplane — until he watched his friend and competitor Aaron Hoag G-LOC and go into the ground in front of him in 2022.

We get into:

• Why enlisting first was a risk he'd take again
• What a Navy flight surgeon prescribed when Pete was struggling in T-45s (hint: Halo)
• Being shot off a carrier deck, and why nothing else compares
• Fighter pilot ego vs. actual humility — and why humility can't read as weakness
• What air racing really takes: micro-knots, wake vortices, and why pole position changes everything
• Losing Aaron, "stem power," and how he got the jet on the ground
• Why the DPE shortage isn't a DPE problem, it's an FAA problem
• What he can read about an applicant in the first two minutes
• Honesty, knowledge, determination — his three traits of a good captain, FO, or wingman
• Exposing your kids to aviation without pushing it

"When we get in an airplane, we're in a survival situation. We're not supposed to be there."

Happy Flying,

Justin