Hi! my name is Dan and I’m your farmer/dad/pilot/builder. I have a wife and three wonderful kids who are all part of this adventure.
I am a single and multi engine instrument pilot with rotorcraft, single engine VFR only. Although I’ve flown corporate most of my aviation career, it has always been for my or our own company so I never did get my commercial certificate. I have a very strange logbook in that of my roughly 1100 hours, almost all of it is high performance, complex, pressurized multi-engine. And about 350 hours of it is turbine. For most of my flying career, I have either been training, or flying for a purpose like hauling customers on trips, or maintenance legs. I’ve never really flown for fun. I’ve never really flown single engine, $100 hamburger trips. I’ve been iced up, flown through a thunderstorm, and generally flown for every reason but pleasure. Till now.
My goal with this project is to do something with my son, and more importantly, to discover, and rediscover, flying for the pure joy of flying. I also want to pass that joy along to my kids.
This blog will be about our aviation exploits in general, but specifically it will be used to document our build of our Just Aircraft SuperSTOL. Our plan is to start in March of 2018 and the goal is to finish by spring of 2019. It’s possible, but my biggest fear is that this project languishes and ends up being a never completed project.
In addition to all things airplane, I am also a farmer. We raise organic cows and pigs and sell them in our store located on our farm. Our farm name is Ninja Cow Farm LLC and our blog is quite well established. While I’m linking from here to there, I’m purposefully not linking from there to here. Until this project has come a lot farther than it is now, this is a side thing that I’m keeping quiet.
I’m also a member of the Civil Air Patrol, along with my son Spork (not his real name). We are active members and I am a mission pilot for our local squadron.
In addition to all of that, I am also a self taught welder, machinist, and wood worker. I also have learned to sail (thank you ASA) and we now regularly (like once per year) take a trip as a family where we bareboat a sailboat somewhere in the Caribbean. If this sounds extravagant, that’s because you weren’t here for the first 20 years where my family vacationed without me at a free place at the local beach. I was working.
Speaking of working, I do stay busy as a gunsmith in addition to farming, which is now in addition to building a plane. Are you starting to understand why I’m worried about finishing this airplane?