About

Hi, I'm Jonathan. I work in airline operations, and I like building tools that make hard days in the operation a little easier.

Outside work, there's no telling what I'll get interested in next. Something catches my attention, I dive in, and see what I can learn or make of it. Sometimes that turns into a whole weather map.

I like figuring things out, making things, and making people laugh—especially when the day could use it. I try to see the best in people, and if I can make someone's day a little easier, that's a good day for me too.

Old maps and people worth remembering

Every few years, I find myself back in genealogy. I want to know where I came from, but mostly I like finding a connection to the people who came before me.

Sometimes that means comparing old maps with modern ones to find where someone lived. I used them to narrow down a possible location for one of my great-grandmothers' homes after her husband died in the Civil War. I also found her pension application, with a letter from her and the last letter her husband wrote.

I have photographs and medals belonging to my grandmother's first husband, who was lost during World War II. I'm honored to look after them and help keep his memory alive.

I spend plenty of time browsing the David Rumsey Map Collection, comparing places across different maps and looking for towns that have been forgotten. Every one of those places held people whose lives were as full as ours. Most of their stories were never written down.

Weather and airplanes, from the start

As a kid I watched The Weather Channel for fun. Airplanes were the other obsession: I loved going to aviation museums, and my third-grade project was on Bernoulli's principle, with a model airplane whose control surfaces actually moved. It took me a while to find a job that combined the two.

How I got here

I grew up in Peachtree City, south of Atlanta, and studied information technology at Georgia Southern. For seven years I worked in quick-service restaurants in Peachtree City, Statesboro and Atlanta, starting as a team member and working up through team leader and kitchen manager to director of equipment and technology, and finally director of technology and innovation across several stores.

My best friend from those restaurant days became an aircraft dispatcher, and when he told me about the job it sounded like a great fit. I went to a local dispatch school while still working in the restaurants, earned my FAA Aircraft Dispatcher certificate in 2016, and started dispatching in 2017 at a flight training academy back home in Peachtree City. From there I moved to a regional airline, where I went from dispatcher and trainer to dispatch coordinator to running shifts in the operations control center: about 700 flights a day. In early 2021 I moved to a major airline in Dallas–Fort Worth. The longer version is on Experience.

What I do

I manage the day-to-day operation of an airline from a network perspective. I oversee a team of dispatchers and operations coordinators, act as the go-between for our hubs, spoke stations and the operations center, and I'm the escalation point when something needs a decision.

A lot of the job is coordination: customer service, maintenance, load planning, maintenance planning and routing, and crew scheduling all have a piece of the picture, especially when weather, air traffic control or a broken airplane starts to unravel the schedule. The broken airplanes are my favorite: working out which other aircraft can cover the flying, or what other plan gets everyone where they need to go.

Not every day is a good one, and some of the hard ones taught me the most. At the regional airline I played a big part in scaling the operation down for COVID, and I've worked through all kinds of technology failures in the middle of a running operation.

How I started building things

At the regional airline, crew swaps were handled with a manual, paper-led process, so I built a tool to replace it. That led to a set of Excel workbooks that automated call scripts and IROPS responses, a "cheat sheet" for working through common and not-so-common problems as an operations coordinator, and a guide that served as a reference for all kinds of regular and irregular events.

Where I am now, I've been moving our Excel-first reporting into one central Power Apps program. Most of what I build comes from the same question: "Can I make this work, and how can I make it better?" I like to experiment until a problem is solved. A few of those tools are on Projects & Tools.

Still watching the weather

Weather is still the thing that most often turns a normal day in the operation into a long one, and I've kept learning it, including meteorology coursework through COMET MetEd. My Aviation Weather Map is where the kid who watched The Weather Channel ended up: radar, satellite, lightning, forecast models and FAA traffic programs on one map, built in my own time.

Outside of work

When I get a minute, I'm usually playing games or reading. I read a lot: educational books, sci-fi, fantasy and LitRPG. My favorite series are Red Rising, Dungeon Crawler Carl, Harry Potter, and The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

I also like studying languages. I've studied Japanese, Russian and Spanish, though I'm not very good at any of them yet.

I live in Dallas–Fort Worth, though I'd love to end up back in Atlanta someday.