Driven-The Premier 1 Driver Story

[Music] one evening we were sitting around at dinner and my dad said oh hey guess what I did today I said what's that and he said I bought a Cessna 172 so we went out and started our flight training and I got my private pilot's license when I was 17 actually was flying an airplane before I was driving a car and continued to build my ratings from there got my private pilot's license in the 172 and then started working on my instrument rating shortly thereafter and went off to the Air Force and the Air National Guard and flew f-16s and 2001 went to work with my dad's company we quickly began to realize that a lot of our customers are in secondary markets so it's hard to get there on the airlines and already being pilots we realize the benefits of being able to fly directly to that town and and visit customers and be able to do it all there and back in one day so our our business grew as a result of being able to service those customers so efficiently the first flight I filmed was going into telluride the scenery there is just fantastic and I just did it purely with one camera so that was my first video on YouTube and I uploaded it when I got to tell you ride didn't think much about it other than that as we started to move up aircraft we went from the 414 which is the first video footage that I had filmed then into the mu2 and I had I think two or three cameras running on that still no cockpit audio are very limited cockpit audio then when we went into the premiere this particular aircraft we bought over in England so my dad and I went over together and picked it up and flew around Europe for a couple weeks before bringing it back I wanted to document that time of flying in Europe as well as bringing an airplane across the Atlantic together I mean that's a bucket list item for anybody who's a pilot and certainly most people who aren't pilots would think coming across the Atlantic in your own planes a pretty cool thing I filmed it more from a pilot's perspective initially and that was going under the assumption that everybody watching it kind of knew what was going on so as I started to get these videos out and people started to provide me feedback on them I realized pretty quickly that probably only half of the people actually watching the videos or pilots so I think there's another whole half of the population that is not pilots but just as interested in finding out what the heck goes on in a cockpit those of us that fly airplanes at this level strive for a certain level of professionalism so if we want to maintain a hundred and fourteen knots on final it's a hundred and fourteen knots it's not a hundred and nine it's not a hundred and twenty-one there's big differences between those it may not seem like a lot but there are so we're always striving for the highest level of professionalism which also is what my videos allow me to critique my performance on on how well I did how well I didn't do and so I have four cameras set up in the cockpit at any one time I generally have one over my shoulder I have one forward I have one over the wing which I use with a patch cord to pick up the ATC audio and then I have a small session that I kind of used as a rover that I'll move around a little bit so the challenge with the cameras is not allowing them to be a distraction from flying the airplane safely on a lot of the videos you'll see Sam in the right-hand seat and Sam is a longtime family friend it's been my summer intern for the last couple summers and he really enjoys riding along in the right seat and we've had a lot of fun with him he's I don't know if you remember the the radio calls where he's trying to get somebody he's checking in and trying to get the controller to tell him good morning so there's a lot of fun banter that goes back and forth between Sam and I and it's really fun to have his enthusiasm and his youthful exuberance up in that and the cockpit with me so the day of a flight I'll arrive early and the first thing I do if I'm going to film that day's flight is get the camera set up that way I can get them all situated in the cockpit and basically forget about them and then I can go and do my pre-flight of the aircraft get everything ready to go and then where most of the videos pick up you'll see is me squeezing myself into the left front seat and getting the cameras rolling and I just let them roll from there and really don't pay attention to them for me that the landscape makes the videos interesting but also the weather and one of the things that I really in try to impress on the viewers is the significance of how powerful weather can be how significantly it can impact your aircraft most notably being thunderstorms so the most recently the the video of flying into Tucson we shot the alley down between a whole bunch of different thunderstorms in my videos I never want to appear Cavalier because that's not how I fly I'm very deliberate I'm very conservative I think that's what has allowed me to to fly all these years with without incident and that's what I want my viewers to be able to have that same benefit as well it still surprises me the number of people that actually watch what I think is the same video as the last one and they find something new in it the number of comments I get about something different in a video always amazes me that shows me that people are really paying attention to the fineness of details so it's a challenge for me to provide content that's going to be new and refreshing and interesting to them but the videos have become for me much more of an opportunity to inspire others to get involved in aviation to renew their license you get out from behind the flight simulator and head out to the airport and learn how to fly and to motivate people to get involved with aviation it's been such a great thing in my life I've met so many wonderful people made great friends it's helped our business grow it's a way that our family has United around trips in the airplane and for me it's an opportunity to give back and encourage people to see what I've been so fortunate to be able to have in my life [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Premier 1 Driver

Views: 459,956

Keywords: premier 1, greg mink, who is premier1driver?, who is premier 1 driver, airplane captain, jet pilot, private pilot, how do I become a pilot

Id: J2AP8KnD1E4

Length: 7min 55sec (475 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 22 2017