I flew around the world and built a plane w/ JP Schulze E368

In 1999, a handful of people gathered at a dusty Namibian airfield to meet two men flying weight-shift microlights around the world. One of them was Mike Blyth. Watching from the crowd was a boy who had never left the country, whose family couldn't afford much flying, and who had no real concept of where these men had come from — only that whatever they were doing, he wanted to do it too.

Twenty-five years later, JP Schulze has flown around the world himself, built the first Sling High Wing off the line — designed by the same Mike Blyth — and become one of the most distinctive filmmakers in aviation.

This one took a while to make happen. We finally met at Oshkosh this year, and JP is candid about being a naturally shy person who ended up with a career in front of a camera.

He grew up in Namibia with no art classes and no creative outlets, thinking in German and Afrikaans, teaching himself English from the Discovery Channel at eight years old. He was taking the controls of his dad's microlight at ten. He funded his first licence by free-diving for crayfish, selling snake venom, and restringing tennis rackets.

The around-the-world trip nearly didn't happen twice. Sponsors walked after a Cirrus ditched near Hawaii and the CAPS pull ran on every news channel — nobody wanted their logo on a small plane over an ocean. So JP and Louis Cole self-funded it, and JP is honest about what that cost: the fourteen-hour legs, the multi-hour shouting match somewhere between Fiji and Kiribati, and the weight of being responsible for a non-pilot's life for the first time.

In this episode:

• Meeting Mike Blyth in 1999 — and building his airplane twenty years later
• Growing up flying "sketchy" weight-shift trikes over the African bush
• Why Southern Africa has a GA scene almost nobody expects
• Moving to New Zealand at seventeen and rebuilding from scratch in a third language
• Meeting Louis Cole on a sand dune and having his life change in a day
• Signing with Discovery, then watching the money disappear
• What flying around the world actually took — and why he'd do it again
• Insisting on being the first to build the Sling High Wing, then helping write the manual
• Why he refuses to post weekly, and what that has cost him
• The sunglasses he built because a $350 pair costs $10 to make
• Why print still matters, and what we both think is at stake

We also recorded a second conversation about the around-the-world flight itself — that one is exclusive to the magazine, with the audio released free a year after publication.

Happy Flying,
Justin

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