About

The path almost stopped me. So I built one for everyone else.

I'm Jack, a high school student in California working toward my private pilot license. I built ZeroToSolo because flying is one of the most rewarding paths I can imagine — and one of the hardest to figure out alone.

How I got here

I started flying my freshman year. I took ground school at San Carlos Airport, taught myself the rest from FAA PDFs and late-night YouTube videos, and applied for three aviation scholarships to help pay for it.

I was denied from all three.

The rejections weren't what stayed with me. What stayed was realizing how many other students never even find those scholarships in the first place — buried across dozens of organization sites with confusing eligibility rules and overlapping deadlines. If you don't know where to look, you don't apply. And if you don't apply, you don't fly.

The students who most need scholarships are usually the ones least likely to know they exist.

What I built

ZeroToSolo is a free planning tool. You answer a few questions about your goals, budget, and where you live, and it generates a personalized roadmap — with real costs, scholarship matches based on who you are, a flight logbook, currency tracking, and curated free resources from FAA handbooks to ground school videos.

Everything is free. No ads, no upsells, no affiliate links. I'm not selling a course at the end. I built it because I needed it, and I knew students with fewer resources than me needed it more.

Who this is for

The student who's curious about flying but doesn't know where to start. The teenager whose family has no aviation connections. The kid who's never met a pilot but watches plane-spotting videos at night. The one who would qualify for a dozen scholarships if anyone told them which ones to apply for.

I want every future pilot to feel like the door is open — not buried under jargon and price tags. That's what I'm building.