My story
I have spent most of my life moving between airplanes, engineering projects and ideas that seemed worth pursuing. Along the way I have built businesses, designed aircraft parts, developed simulators, taught people to fly and ridden a motorcycle around the world.
Where it started
My father started Pretoria Transit Interiors in the early 1990s. I grew up around the business and learned CAD in the AutoCAD MS-DOS era. In high school I welded farm equipment for money, competed in motorcycle and bicycle trials and earned my private pilot certificate at 17.
I tried college for two semesters, decided flying was more urgent, and completed my commercial and instructor ratings in 2009.
Seven airplanes and a different education
In 2009 I started Murfreesboro Aviation with one aircraft. By the time I sold it in 2011, the school had grown to seven aircraft and five employees. I taught, managed the business, flew experimental and homebuilt aircraft and accumulated roughly 3,000 hours.
My father died in October 2010. Selling the school and losing him changed the direction of everything that came next.
The long way home
In 2011 I left Tennessee on a motorcycle and headed east. Roughly 25,000 miles later I returned after crossing Europe, Russia, Mongolia and a long list of places where the plan stopped working.
The trip involved crashes, mechanical failures, improvised repairs and strangers who repeatedly proved more generous than expected. It eventually became The $500 Bet and How I Met My Father.
Back to school—and back to building
I returned to Middle Tennessee State University, worked at a motorcycle shop, joined Formula and Baja projects, rebuilt motorcycles and spent a summer supporting flight testing of Yates ElectroSpace's electric Long-EZ. In 2014 I graduated among the top five in my class with a degree in Mechanical Engineering Technology and an aerospace focus.
I also married the same woman twice that year, in June and September. It is a long, good story.
Cars, giant airplanes and air racing
At Nissan I led quality work for the all-electric Leaf, designed production and inspection tooling and helped introduce newer digital manufacturing technology into the plant. I left Nissan for Scaled Composites, where I supported construction of the Stratolaunch center wing, then returned to Nissan.
Outside the plant, independent projects kept expanding: Eddie's Molecule, Red Bull Flugtag, aircraft sensors and G-meters, X-Plane models and Red Bull Air Race development. The boundaries between engineering, simulation and flying were already disappearing.
BlackFly and physical simulation
From 2018 through 2020 I worked at Opener, now Pivotal, as Mechanical Design Engineering Manager for BlackFly. I designed aircraft structures, production tooling, gauges, jigs and assembly systems while leading a multidisciplinary engineering team.
I also designed and built physical simulators used to evaluate flight dynamics, controls, ergonomics, pilot interface and training. Around the same time I began developing augmented- and mixed-reality systems in Unity.
Sim Your Plane
After leaving Opener and moving to South Carolina, I focused on turning Sim Your Plane into a production kit and then into complete simulator projects. The work grew from removable aircraft-control sensors into helicopter, firefighting, eVTOL, full-motion and full-force-feedback simulators.
Projects included an MD500 aerial-saw simulator, a multiplayer firefighting system for Bridger Aerospace, a full-motion Composite FX simulator and a complete University of Nebraska Air Tractor 502 renovation from MS-DOS to Windows 11.
Flying becomes the main work again
By 2023 I was flying nearly full time. That grew into Cirrus instruction and operations, an SF50 type rating, PA-31 and PA-46T flying, TL Sport Aircraft demonstration and test flying, airshow support, formation work and photo-ship missions at Sun 'n Fun and Oshkosh.
In 2026 I crossed the Atlantic in an SR22, began flying the DA62, ferried a Navion and a bush plane across the United States and flew photo missions alongside a Lockheed Constellation.
HMARD
HMARD began in 2023 as the next step in a much longer progression: aircraft simulation, physical controls, mixed reality and real flying brought into the same system. It combines aircraft position and attitude, independent head tracking, Unity and a stereoscopic display to place virtual aircraft and training objects into live flight.
Versions 0.1 through 0.3 have moved from early flight testing to a smaller, self-contained computer system. Like most of my projects, it continues to change every time it leaves the workbench.
Still moving
The work, flying and adventure have never been separate lives. A motorcycle rebuild turns into an engineering project. A simulator leads back into an aircraft. A flight-test problem becomes a new piece of hardware.
That is what this site is for: a record of what I have worked on, where I have flown and what I am still figuring out.