Flight training

That was kind of the, the hard, the hard way to do it.

[chuckles] But, uh, uh, went through the Coast Guard Academy and then got lucky enough, went straight to flight school.

Uh, didn't have to go to a boat.

So went straight to flight school out of the academy.

Uh, so graduated in 2013, straight to flight school in Pensacola, and graduated there in around 2015 and went up to Humboldt Bay, California, where I flew the MH-65, uh, and flew that for my whole career.

In Humboldt Bay, Mobile, Alabama, then Houston, Texas, uh, were my three, uh, primary duty stations that I flew.

That's awesome.

Just for our listeners, if, if you can recall, like, what's a day-- what's like the-- like, what's the worst day at the Academy and what's the best day at the Academy?

No, that's my wings.

Those are my wings for flight school.

Yeah.

Oh, wow.

You went to flight school? Yes.

Were you driving these aircraft?

I actually was a navigator in E6s.

This is Mr. Mazzawi.

And Mazzawi was training at a flight school in...

I guess it was Minnesota, wasn't it? Minnesota.

Right.

Comes from a middle-class, quite well-off family in Saudi Arabia.

Sweet guy, apparently, according to everybody that actually knew him.

And he turns up one day at a flight school, the same flight school that Muzawi went to, but their Phoenix location, with not only a pilot's license, but a commercial license, 600 hours minimum.

The guy couldn't speak English.

Well, there's been quite a bit of disagreement, but all of us agree that Hadi Hanjer, the alleged hijacker, could not have flown the plane that did those maneuvers that we described earlier, like a fighter jet.

He failed Cessna Flying School.

Right.

I mean, the things they try to get us to believe are extraordinary.

And Kenneth Whiting proceeds to negotiate.

He agrees that American pilots will be trained at the French Army Flying School at Tours.

He agrees that American mechanics will go to a French machine school at Saint-Raphaël.

Then he goes further.

Anyways.

Well, in my world, I'm slowly crawling out of my hole of starting this new flight school business and I'm back to not that I ever stopped selling planes, but I was only catering to the business that I had.

I wasn't really taking on new business or looking for new business because I was so freaking busy.

But lately I've been getting back into the broker side of my life, which feels really great because I love our team at Lone Mountain more than anything.

And now I'm so back.

So Mindy has this thing where she gets distracted, right? We all know it.

This season's distractibility is buying a flight school, which is quite large.

But whenever she gets back in the game, she really gets back into the game.

He co-founded the Larimer County UAS team, which offers drone services for fire, police, and search and rescue operations.

Chris also founded the CSU Drone and Flight School, which they helped to facilitate over 900 individuals in obtaining their Part 107 FAUS certificate.

Additionally, he serves as an adjunct professor with the Walter Scott College of Engineering, where he teaches UAS technology classes.

He holds both an FAA private pilot and a remote pilot's license.

Yeah.

So we offer three main products.

The biggest one, our most popular, is the CSU Drone Flight School.

Okay.