Biography

I grew up in Strasbourg — France, between two mountain ranges: the Vosges, where a Wednesday could mean soaring above the slopes of the Schnepfenried with my paraglider, and the Swiss Alps, where all my spare time meant Crans-Montana, teaching skiing on weekends and vacations for pocket change.

The mountains do not care how you feel about them. They do not negotiate, they do not reward good intentions, and they will not meet you halfway on bad weather days. You learn to read the conditions, respect them and adjust your plan. You learn from mistakes in a very pragmatic way, and I have carried the lesson ever since.

Today I live in a stretch of desert that shares nothing with the mountains I grew up in except the same underlying rule: know where you are, respect it and adapt. In aviation, we call that Situation Awareness.

🍽️ A table without screens

I am French, and that shapes my life more than I can explain. A meal shared with people you choose, at a table without screens, is not a small thing. It is close to the whole point: a moment where conversation matters. It shapes the importance of my roots, how I see beauty, my understanding of traditions, and how the civilisation I come from carries its values into the future.

Doing things with care matters, particularly the small things.

Some of that comes from years in haute hôtellerie — luxury hospitality — in Switzerland, where I learned that good service is never one charming person on a good day. It is a hundred quiet details, repeated until effortless, until they become second nature.

But mostly it is just how I was raised, and it has stayed with me longer than any job has.

❤️ The epicentre

I am a husband and a father, and that is the epicentre of my life. Everything else gets weighed against it. If a habit or a system makes me steadier at home, I keep it.

I am also, again, a triathlete. I raced years ago. Then, in 2025, my father passed away, and two months back in France took the training habit apart completely. I am rebuilding it now, in a climate that punishes anyone who ignores it. Alongside the training I am studying nutrition seriously enough to sit for certification.

I keep circling the same question: what does it actually take for a body to keep its promises at 52? The real answer: sleep, recovery, patience and consistency — which I have been failing at lately. The ability to slowly adopt small correct choices that will only become visible over time.

🧭 Three careers, one pattern

I have always been curious beyond usefulness — sometimes to my detriment, to the point it was often mistaken for procrastination or indecision.

I trained and worked in hospitality, then spent close to fifteen years building things on the web, to become a commercial pilot in 2011 before joining the airline industry in 2014. I now fly the Airbus A330 on long-haul routes.

Three careers is a strange résumé, but I never planned to collect them. Curiosity kept winning the argument over stability, and each time it brought me somewhere new. However, I noticed the same pattern every time: people want someone to make a complex situation clear. Hotel guests, website clients, passengers who trust two experts in a cockpit with their evening — same thing.

I seem to be built for that particular role: serving people in the best way I can.

Aviation gave me the sharpest version of it. Long-haul flying runs on methods: brief before you act, fly the plan, adapt to the unplanned, debrief honestly, improve on purpose. It is not about being a hero in the moment, because these methods are the only things that will keep everything together when you can least trust yourself.

✍️ Why I write

That is the material I write from now. Aviation is the source, not the subject. The writing is really about the rest of it: a childhood in the mountains, a desert life, a family I love beyond everything, a body I am trying to keep honest, with a mind that never stopped asking how things actually hold together.

The essays live here; the newsletter and the various posts on this website. Feel free to read my ethics statement next.