Connor Smith-Gall

His story

He came to build airplanes. He stayed to fly them.

Connor Smith-Gall did not come to aviation to become a pilot. He was on a path toward aerospace engineering, and he started flying mainly to understand the machines he wanted to build. Then, at 19, a conversation in the truck with his instructor turned it around. “I don’t know why you want to build planes when you could just fly them,” Erick told him. Somewhere in his private pilot training a deep passion for aviation took hold, and he decided to chase it as a career.

The hardest part was not the flying. Partway through, Connor ran into a medical certification problem that put the whole dream in question. He had fallen in love with aviation, and then he was told he might not be able to do it. For a young man, that was a heavy thing to carry, and there was a stretch where he did not believe it would happen.

He did not quit. He kept moving forward in small steps, week by week, and leaned on a supportive and resourceful group of people around him to work through it. Coming out the other side of that fight is when he committed, fully, to becoming a career pilot no matter how hard it would be.

Since then he has earned his private, instrument, and commercial certificates, and he is working toward his CFI. He points to his commercial long cross-country to Chino, where he navigated bad weather and busy airspace on the way home, as the flight where it finally clicked that he could really do this. His advice to anyone thinking about it is simple: go take a discovery flight, and know that becoming a pilot is hard, but it is doable.