News flash

Currently I am a First Officer with British Airways Cityflyer on the AVRO RJ100 and soon to be RJ85. Based and living with my wife in the Scottish capitol Edinburgh

About me...

I'll keep the info brief as I know you're not really interested in a boring long story. I think my story is the same as most people crazy of flying, apart from the fact that I got the opportunity to realise my dream, becoming a pilot!

I studied Aviation Logistics for four year at the Dutch Aviation College in Hoofddorp, NL. This study included two internships, one with a air cargo broker (NCS) and the other one with Martinair Cargo.

After getting my degree I decided to take up another study. This time Aviation Operations. That took me another three years and included two internships as well. The first one was with a former Dutch charter airline called Dutchbird as a operations officer. By that time it was by far one of the best times I ever had. Great company, job and people. The biggest bonus for me was that I was able to fly across Europe on the jumpseat of 'our' A320's and 757's. Have a browse through my photo's here.

I ended that study with the second internship at transavia.com. Again a great company and people. Those photo's you can find here.

So now I've got two degrees but the next logical step was to try and realise my long lasting dream; become a commercial pilot. And I got that chance through EPST in Holland. I started my flight training in August 2005 and finished in january of 2007 with my first job six weeks later!

Some facts then. I used to play soccer for 13 years at the local soccer club calles Wiron. My wife and I love to travel and have seen some great places together. The list so far includes the Maldives, Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, Mauritius, Turkey, Mexico and some European destinations.

My other passion is Microsoft Flight Simulator. After two sebatical years during my training I'm about to re-start this hobby again. Besides this I like to shoot some nice pictures of planes. Mostly commercial and upload them to airliners.net and planepictures.net. Most of my other shots are loaded onto my flickr page.

My wife and I got Married in September of 2007 on the tropical island of Mauritius. Here she is during a brief visit during my flight training at EPST/Oxford Aviation.

The flying bit ...

After doing selections I started my training with EPST in Utrecht, Holland. Most of the training is done through Oxford Aviation in the uk. Six months of gruweling studying devided over two periods leeds up to the initial flying part in Phoenix USA.

That's where you end with your Commercial Pilot's License (CPL) and return to Oxford in the UK to do get your Instrument Rating. (IR) That's one of the most important exams/papers you will ever get/do.

Once I completed all of this it was back to EPST in Utrecht to start the Airline Jet Foundation Course on a Boeing 737NG simulator. (JOC) Basically a introduction to the commmercial, non single pilot enviroment. Once that was completed it was back to the UK to do a Multi Crew Co- operation (MCC) course with Oxford Aviation. Once I completed all of this satisfactory I was done with the training. It took me 16/17 months all together and was very intense, not only for me alone, but one of the best periods in my life so far! Who knows what happens next...