I got into airplanes for the flying. I stayed for the owners.

How it started

I spent my childhood obsessed with aircraft.

My brother was ten years older than me, and when he was 18 he got into remote-control airplanes. I followed him straight into it. By eight I was scratch-building RC aircraft, and soon after that I was flying them.

Around the same time I was picking up another skill that would shape how I approach aviation: understanding machines. By ten I was helping my brother restore Volkswagen Beetles. By fourteen I was restoring my own classic cars and selling them for a profit so I could afford the next project. Long before I ever worked around full-size airplanes, I was learning how mechanical systems work, how to troubleshoot them, and how much attention to detail matters when you're responsible for a machine.

But I still hadn't figured out that aviation could be my career. That changed because of my best friend's new stepfather, a Delta Air Lines L-1011 captain. One day he invited me into his office and asked what I wanted to be when I grew up. I threw out a few ideas, including automobile designer.

He looked at me and said, “Why don't you fly?”

My answer was pretty simple: I didn't take orders particularly well, and I knew the military probably wasn't going to be my path. That's when he explained something nobody had ever explained to me before. I didn't have to go through the military. I could go to college, earn my ratings through the civilian route, and make flying my profession.

He told me, “Being a pilot is the best job in the world.”

Boy, was he right.

I went home completely fired up and announced to my parents, “I'm going to be an airline pilot.” Their initial reaction wasn't exactly enthusiastic: “No you're not. Pilots cheat on their wives.”

That didn't slow me down much. I was persistent enough that eventually everyone understood this wasn't a phase.

I sought out the best Part 141 aviation education I could find in Texas, attending TSTC and Tarleton State University. I finished my bachelor's in Aviation Science in three years while earning my certificates and ratings through CFI, CFII and MEI.

College also opened up a side of aviation I didn't know existed. I became best friends with Ladd Gardner, whose father, Lefty Gardner, was a legendary airshow and warbird pilot, a Reno Air Racer, and one of the founders of the Confederate Air Force. Suddenly I wasn't just around training airplanes. I was around warbirds, air racing, aerobatics, and some of the most accomplished aviators in the world. I even got to ride with Lefty in his P-38, doing aerobatics on the way to an airshow. After that, my idea of what an airplane and a pilot could do was never the same.

After college I went straight into flight instruction at a large flight school in Dallas, moved up to chief instructor, and taught in roughly 15 different aircraft types, including multiengine, tailwheel and aerobatic airplanes. I also got heavily involved in spin training and provided much of the required spin endorsement training for CFI candidates around DFW. That's where the childhood interests finally met: flying, teaching, mechanics, performance, and understanding airplanes at a level deeper than the left seat.

Then my plan changed in a single week. I had built enough experience to land an interview with United Express. It was scheduled, I was prepared, and I assumed the airline path I'd mapped out years earlier was about to start. Less than a week before the interview, I was offered a job flying a Cessna 340 for a private owner — roughly twice the money for less than half the work.

I took the job, and discovered what I still think is one of the best-kept secrets in aviation: Part 91 corporate flying. You're taking people to incredible places, operating great equipment, and building relationships with the people you fly for. I remember thinking: I'm basically getting paid to go on vacation.

But that first corporate job taught me something more important. I wasn't just flying the airplane; I got involved in managing its maintenance and operating costs, and all those years rebuilding cars suddenly paid off. I could speak the language of the maintenance shop. I could tell when something didn't make mechanical sense, question a diagnosis, catch unnecessary work, and keep the owner from being overcharged. Understanding the airplane beyond the cockpit saved owners real money, and that became a theme for the rest of my career.

The Cessna 340 led to a Conquest II with Dash 10 engines, then a Citation S/II, then progressively more sophisticated aircraft and operations. Before long I was helping people buy and sell airplanes and managing pre-purchase inspections. Over the next 25 years I held Part 91 flying and aircraft-management positions while also working with Part 135 operators as a pilot and consultant, which showed me the other side of the business: how operators actually function, how the regulations get applied in the real world, and how to work with the FAA. Along the way I logged more than 8,500 hours operating aircraft across the United States and around the world.

These days I fly a Citation Sovereign for a fantastic family and take contract assignments for other owners in a variety of aircraft. But flying is only part of it now. I spend a lot of my free time talking with aircraft owners and staying connected across the industry, and those relationships keep turning up airplanes that never reach the public market — which is how my acquisition clients get looks at aircraft they'd otherwise never see.

And when it's time to make a deal, I negotiate hard. I've picked up a reputation as a fierce negotiator, but I don't believe a good transaction requires somebody else to lose. Mediation has become one of my favorite parts of this business. Aircraft transactions get emotional fast: buyers have concerns, sellers have priorities, maintenance findings appear, expectations change. My job is to listen carefully enough to understand what each party actually needs, then find the solution that lets both sides walk away feeling they were treated fairly.

Pilot, mechanic, aircraft manager, consultant, broker. Doing all of those jobs is what changed how I look at aircraft ownership — and it's why Pulse exists.

Why Pulse Aero Group needed to exist

Over my career I got to see just about every way an aviation department can go right, and every way it can go wrong. Eventually that became Pulse Aero Group.

Aircraft owners are usually very successful people. Their time is valuable, and they didn't buy an airplane so they could spend their days arguing with maintenance facilities, scrutinizing invoices, researching recurring failures, chasing compliance issues, or wondering whether the people advising them have a financial incentive they're not being told about. They need somebody in their corner. That's the role I wanted Pulse to fill: an owner's advocate with enough experience across flying, maintenance, management, acquisitions and sales to understand how the pieces fit together.

I've seen practices in aircraft brokerage that I simply don't agree with. I've seen back-to-back transactions where an intermediary buys an aircraft from one party and immediately resells it to the actual buyer at a higher price, pocketing the spread instead of transparently representing the client. I've seen pre-purchase inspections managed with more concern for closing the transaction than for whether the airplane was right for the buyer. And I've seen thin research before an acquisition turn into expensive maintenance surprises afterward — problems that could have been found before the airplane was purchased.

Management has its own version of the same disease. Maintenance items handled badly enough to create compliance and even safety concerns. Shops that misdiagnose a problem, replace expensive components that don't fix it, and still hand the whole bill to the owner. Aircraft managed by people who don't know the individual airplane well enough to spot the warning signs of a known failure before it becomes expensive downtime.

Owners shouldn't have to become aviation experts to protect themselves from any of that. We should be the experts for them.

So Pulse's job is to fight those battles before the owner ever needs to know there was a battle: scrutinize the maintenance, ask the uncomfortable questions, research the airplane, and challenge anything that doesn't make sense. When we represent someone in a transaction, our loyalty is to the client, not to the closing. Saving money is part of it, but the bigger wins are the owner's time, the health of the aircraft, fewer surprises — private aviation working the way it was supposed to in the first place.

That experience goes beyond the airplane itself. Over the last several years I've partnered with some exceptional pilots and flight attendants, and together we've turned flights into something much more memorable — moving a family across the country, handling an important business trip, or helping someone celebrate one of life's big occasions.

Behind the scenes, aircraft management should be exacting, technical work that never lets up. For the owner and their guests, it should feel effortless.

How I approach a new client

One of the first questions people ask is, “At what point does owning an aircraft make more sense than chartering?” You'll hear numbers like $500,000 a year in charter spend thrown around as a crossover point. We can run that analysis, and we do. But starting there misses the biggest reason to own an aircraft.

Ownership is about control.

My first conversation with a client starts with their mission. Why do you want to fly private? Who are you flying with, and how many? How much luggage? Where do you go, and how often? What are you actually trying to accomplish? Then we talk about the ways to get there — charter, dry lease, or ownership — and what each one really means.

If the only objective is the cheapest way to occasionally fly privately, charter may win the spreadsheet. That's rarely what my clients are after. They want to know who is flying their family — how experienced those pilots are, how they're trained, whether they're rested. They want to know their aircraft's maintenance history, who has been working on it, and whether the maintenance meets their standard rather than the minimum needed to keep an airplane producing revenue. They want the airplane configured, stocked and operated around their preferences. And when they need to leave, they want their airplane and their crew.

For a client whose priority is control over their aircraft, crew, maintenance and travel experience, ownership with exceptional management is the standard I recommend. Then we solve the financial side intelligently: decades of operating experience plus market research, aircraft data and industry subscription tools to find the aircraft that fits the mission, model acquisition and operating costs, evaluate tax considerations with the client's tax professionals, and look for chances to buy an exceptionally good aircraft at the right price.

Pulse operates on a transparent commission structure. We don't use back-to-back contracts to quietly buy an aircraft at one price and sell it to our client at another. Our job is to represent the owner — and that continues after the acquisition. Good management means knowing the airplane intimately, anticipating problems, challenging questionable diagnoses, controlling maintenance costs and protecting the owner's time.

I don't try to make ownership compete with charter on hourly price. I want ownership so well executed that charter isn't the experience you're comparing it to anymore.