About Me

Hello there! Welcome to my site, if you'd like to learn a bit more about me, you're in the right place.

I'm Tom, I'm 22 years old and I'm from a small village in Oxfordshire in the United Kingdom, but I currently live in West Sussex near to Gatwick airport where I work as an airline pilot flying the Airbus A320 family for a very orange UK airline having finished my A320 type rating in March 2024 and a two year integrated ATPL course in November 2023.

It feels pretty awesome to be able to say that, so I wrote this page to document how I ended up in this position.

My interest in aviation as a whole started when I was younger, I think originally from my interest in other large transport vehicles. I was quite obsessed with buses, trains, trucks, and ships. I always enjoyed travelling and found all my airport experiences as a kid and getting to fly particularly thrilling. As I got older, I became more interested in the technical and engineering aspects of flying, and the design behind some of the systems onboard modern airliners. I also got the bug for air traffic control which eventually led me to discover the world of Vatsim, and I even considered a career as an air traffic controller at one point.

I spent far too many hours in front of an iPad or laptop watching Matt Davies and similar YouTubers, whilst absorbing as much as I could about the aircraft they were flying in the simulator. I played my first flight simulator, Microsoft Flight Simulator X: Steam Edition, the day after my 13th birthday, having received it as a gift from my dad. I was instantly hooked, and soon found myself a member of a prominent, although now defunct, virtual airline. For the first few months, I kept myself to FSX multiplayer, occasionally using a Teamspeak server to simulate some rather unrealistic ATC with other members of the virtual airline. Eventually, I wanted more and signed up for Vatsim in November 2016. I can remember very little about my first few times connecting. Mostly I remember being terrified of making a mistake. With the help of YouTube and the Vatsim website, I eventually managed a few successful flights in the Aerosoft Airbus A320 in FSX.

Since then, I've logged over 1000 hours as a pilot on the network and somewhere around 400 as an air traffic controller.

I started streaming flight simulator (FSX) on Twitch in 2019, long before I became a pilot in real life. I started off streaming 3-4 days per week, usually to an audience of around 30 depending on the day. As any streamer will tell you, I look back on my old streams and cringe at how bad I was at everything, and how poor my quality of flying was, as I only had limited real-world flying experience, a handful of hours in a beat-up Cessna 152 around the circuit at a local airfield. I quickly switched my simulator over to P3Dv4 after I started streaming to a larger audience, then to P3Dv5 when that was released, and then gradually transitioned to Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 when that was released, but I'm sure I'll move to MSFS 2024 when that releases.

Alongside flight simulator, I also gained my Vatsim controller ratings with Vatsim UK and streamed my controlling sessions, usually at Gatwick or Edinburgh. I did my S1 (ground) and S2 (tower) training at Edinburgh, and my S3 (radar) training at Liverpool. I also mentored tower students for a short period, in an attempt to give back what I'd gained from the excellent training department at Vatsim UK (but I still owe them an awful lot).

I am sometimes asked if I will ever get my C1 (area control/centre) rating on Vatsim, and my answer at the moment is that I'm honestly too busy to go through the training, and I'm not particularly interested in area control, I much prefer to control radar, where I can vector aircraft to a landing, and whilst I would still be able to do that top-down from London Control, I think I need more practice to get better at what I already do (albeit infrequently at the moment) before I start thinking about increasing my workload any further!

I took a hiatus from streaming towards the end of 2020, as I was finishing my A-Levels and starting flight school, but not before a mega 16-hour-long charity stream. It is to this day, still the longest stream I've ever done (and probably ever will do), and it still ended up overrunning to over 17 hours. I really enjoyed the stream, and if you were there, I hope you can say you remember how fun it was. You can read more about this and other charity events I've been part of, check out the charity page.

I did my flight training with an integrated provider, completing my ground school theory training in about 9 months. For those that care, I did the UKQB 2020 syllabus for my ATPL exams, not long after it had first been released, so I'm not saying that people completing exams now have it easy but... ATPLQ was not as strong as it is now.

I did my single-engine training in the incredibly hot state of Arizona in the United States, out of Falcon Field Airport (KFFZ/MSC) flying the Piper Archer TX, which is a PA-28-181 airframe with dual Garmin G1000 avionics (and luckily specced with aircon). I lived in an apartment provided by the flight school, sharing a room with one of my friends for the entire training period of about 10 months, minus a small handful of days which I took to travel. The training started with basic flight training, until my first solo which I completed on 21st November 2022 in N28958, callsigned OXF4560, and then moved on to VFR navigation, 50 hours of solo flying, and then instrument flying under the hood (for the non-pilots- a device that obscures the pilot's view of the outside).

I found the flying in Arizona incredible, and well worth the work I had to put in. The scenery is beautiful, and I wish I could fly there again someday. Waking up at 4 or 5 am was well worth it to fly solo at sunrise across the state and eat pancakes for breakfast at an airport cafe. Outside of flying, I found my time in America mostly fun, I learned to embrace the 40-degree Celsius weather and enjoyed my days off at the pool, or hanging out with friends, going out for food, that sort of stuff. I did manage to go on a few trips, including to Sedona, which is honestly the most beautiful place I have ever been to, I highly highly recommend a visit if you are ever nearby (or even if you're not).

My friends in real life will tell you that I had mixed feelings about living in America, and that's true, but I don't want to be overly negative here about all the things I found bewildering over there. I know for sure that an American stuck in the UK for almost a year would find plenty to complain about. Overall, the experience was great, and I picked up plenty of new friends for life while I was there.

I left the States in June 2023, after being allowed to return to the UK to help balance the load between the flight school's bases and complete all my multi-engine flight training in the UK, rather than doing my VFR flying in America, and then multi-engine instrument rating (MEIR) in the UK, which was the standard way of doing things at the time. I did my CPL skills test in the Piper Seneca V (PA34) which was a beast of an aircraft to fly, and being local to Oxford Airport made the experience great from a quality-of-life perspective. After that, I completed my MEIR on the same aircraft type and moved on to my airline pilot standards multi-crew cooperation (APS MCC) course. I did my APS MCC on a fixed-base Boeing 737-800 simulator. I enjoyed flying a bigger aircraft, and it was interesting to adjust to not flying solo the entire time, but I solidified my preference for Airbus during that course. I finished my APS MCC and my entire integrated ATPL course in November 2023.

Luckily for me, I got the chance to apply for a position flying the Airbus A320 family at my dream airline straight out of flight school, and I managed to pass the selection process. I did my A320 type rating in February/March 2024, and I started working for the airline in May 2024.

And that brings me to where I am now. I feel so lucky to be in such a fortunate position at such a young age, and I love what I do. I can't wait to progress at my airline and gain experience. I'd like to thank you for reading about me, and if you have any comments or questions you'd like to ask me, I'd love to hear from you.