At the age of eighteen, I left my hometown of Hemingway, SC after enlisting in the US Air Force where I served for four years as an F-16 Avionics Technician.  Upon leaving the military, I accepted a contract position working on F-16s for the Royal Netherlands Air Force (Koninklijke Luchtmacht in Dutch) for a year and was based at Volkel Air Base (Vliegbasis Volkel) in The Netherlands.

On my return stateside, I accepted a job with ESAB Welding & Cutting in Florence, SC as a Field Service Technician, retrofitting and repairing large gantry plasma, waterjet, and oxyfuel cutting machines.  It didn’t take long for the aviation bug to bite me again, though, and within a year I moved with my future wife (we’re now married and have four kids) to Greensboro, NC to work as an avionics technician at one of Cessna’s Citation Service Centers. 

After five years at the Service Center, I got my A&P Certificate and went to work for a Part 91 corporate flight department in Charlotte, NC who operated two Citation Excels and a Citation Sovereign at the time.  Fifteen years later, I’m married, a father of four kids, and the Director of Maintenance for the same flight department, which now operates a Dassault Falcon 900LX. 

In early 2017, at the age of 39, I started fulfilling a lifelong dream of learning to fly.  I started taking lessons in a 1946 Aeronca Champ and by mid-2019 had earned my Commercial-Multi and Instrument ratings. In June 2020, I received my SIC type rating in the Falcon 900LX at FlightSafety International’s DFW Center. Five months later I went back for recurrent training and passed the type check for a PIC type rating.