I came to aviation at a very young age. While I do not remember exactly when I have started to like planes, I know that by my teenage years, I could identify almost any military plane in services in the US and even sometimes variants of the plane.

Paris and Aviation

As a kid, I grew up in the north east suburbs of Paris, France. This area has a very strong aviation culture. For one, two of the main Paris airports are located in this area and were less than 30 minutes away from my house. I'm, of course, talking about the Paris Charles de Gaulle (CDG) airport and Le Bourget airport.

Charles de Gaulle is an international platform with lots of traffic, which guarantee for any kids wanting to see airplanes many opportunities. It was home for the Air France's Concorde and it was always an amazing sight to see this bird rolling for takeoff or going back to the terminals.

Le Bourget is different. It is still an active airport but not as grand as it used to be. It is more dedicated to general aviation but limited to instrument approach only. Le Bourget & CDG are located in a no VFR zone. But Le Bourget is also known for two other important elements:

1. This is the airport where Charles Lindberg landed after crossing the Atlantic with the Spirit of Saint Louis.
2. This is the home of the International Aviation Show! Every two years all the commercial and military aviation comes to Le Bourget to show off their latest product and takes orders from customers.

   While this is mainly a business event but it is open to the public at least 3 days. Because there is a lot of flight demonstration, as a kid, I could see the planes doing demonstrations from my classrooms. It was on the week end that I would go and chase all the planes possible to take some pictures and remember the planes. The most memorable salon is definitely the one post the first Iraq war. The US Air Force brought all the planes of Desert Storm in Le Bourget! Including the SR71 Blackbird and the F-117! Being able to approach these mythic planes as close as 30 feet was an amazing experience for the teenager that I was.

Aviation as a job

Since my interest for airplane at the time was essentially around military plane, I have never considered learning to fly. The likelihood for an asthmatic wearing glasses C student to enter flight school is equal to … 0! So I did not even bother checking anything the requirements to join the army as a pilot… As for general aviation, I had no money and no airport near by that could go to to get flying lessons. So the possibility of flying was just not possible. But there was another possibility : Air Traffic Controller. That was close from the aviation world and I was very interested by the career opportunities offered. I manage to register for the exam for the admission. I did fairly good at the exam: 250 out of 2000 people! Unfortunately, only 20 seats were open. No chance to get in with such a score! I gave up the idea altogether and focalize on my other hobby: software development.

Reconnecting with Aviation

I became an software engineer and planes were far away. After my study and my mandatory year in the French Army, I moved to Velizy Villacoublay to join my current company and once again, I ended up living in front of an important airport! But this one is different from all the other ones because it is the airport of the French Government. This is where all the official planes from France and other countries are coming and leaving.
This is an airport with special memory for me as it is the airport where the body of one of my friend who died during a U.N. mission in Eastern Europe came back to France through.

Discovering aviation in the US
This is my training has a Software Engineer that offered me the possibility to cross the pond and come to the US. I met my fiancé and we moved together in a brand new house north of Minneapolis! Pretty soon after, I've realized that a small airport was actually located on my commute route and it didn't took long for my fiancé to realize that I was trying to get a peak at the airport from the road each and every time we were driving by it. The road was 35W and the airport is the Anoka County Blaine Airport (KANE). It's a significant airport in size with two runways but the view from the highway was not good enough to grasp its size.

We talked about aviation and being a pilot but it seems that it was too expensive at the time, probably too difficult to grasp and not really a priority. We had started both some studies and we had not much time to devote to such an activity. I never gave much attention to the airport beyond trying to get a pick at the planes.

Flight Simulation

Like many kids, I have been attracted by video games. Very early, I found a particular attraction in anything related to simulation, with a preference towards flight simulation of course!

From Falcon 1 & 2 at the time it was running on Amiga (ie: the ancestors of today PC as far as gaming is concerned). I have spent countless hours playing the missions, flying, doing impossible landing maneuvers and …, of course, … ending up crashing the planes! It seems that all this time playing might end up paying back after all but that would be the topic of later post…