EAA Sport Aviation - April 2012

Not long ago, a pilot named Mike Singer, who had spent a decade as a writer and technology evangelist on Microsoft’s Flight Simulator team, sent a text to another pilot friend bemoaning this sad state of affairs. Mike had been watching episodes from a short-lived sci-fi western series called Firefly, which got him thinking about how space travel in the future might be a lot like ocean travel in the past. “I think we were born either 50 years too late or 500 years too early,” Mike wrote.

Aidan Loehr, the friend who received
that text, begged to differ.

“There’s plenty of adventures, right here
and now,” he argued. “It’s always out there.
The problem is, most people don’t go find it.
And it rarely falls in your lap. You have to go
out and look for it.”
Aidan should know. Because if the folks
at Central Casting wanted to find a real-life
version of Indiana Jones, they’d need look
no further than Aidan’s doorstep. Seriously.

He’s an experienced Alaskan bush pilot, has flown relief supplies in Africa and Caravans in Nepal, and has ferried airplanes around the world, accumulating more than 17,000 flight hours in only 20 years. He’s also an accomplished rock climber and mountain climbing guide who’s shepherded clients up peaks ranging from Alaska’s Denali to South America’s Aconcagua and mountains in remote regions of China.

Aidan has flown a team of puking sled dogs into Bethel, Alaska, bivouacked overnight on sheer rock cliffs in Yosemite, and been held at gunpoint in the Congo. And while he’s not an expert on world antiquities, he’s impressively well-read and knowledgeable about philosophy, literature, and world events—a result, perhaps, of having a lot of reading time while waiting for flight or climbing conditions to improve. Oh, yeah. And despite his laid-back, thoughtful persona, he’s also a former Marine, so he could probably hold his own in a tough scrape.

All of which is to say, when Aidan told Mike that he thought the age of adventure was still alive and well in the world, he knew whence he spoke. But exchanges like that one, which were a running theme between the two friends, eventually sparked an idea.

Mike and Aidan met in the early 1990s, when the two of them were working as line guys at Seattle’s Kenmore Air seaplane base and dreaming of getting adventurous flying jobs in Alaska. Even then, they’d been frustrated at how little information was available on the subject.

Twenty years later, however, the friends realized that Aidan now had a wealth of knowledge about a wide variety of non-conventional flying jobs in the world. Mike, meanwhile, had accumulated a wealth of knowledge about computers and Web technology.