Hi, my name is Ilya. I’m a Captain at a passenger airline in the United States. I fly the Embraer E170 all over the East Coast.
I’m in my late 30s and I haven’t always been a pilot. The first 18 years of my career were spent as a Ruby on Rails developer, starting back in 2006 in Krasnoyarsk, Siberia. I learned to work remotely for foreign companies and eventually used my career to immigrate to the States. My brothers and I had a popular blog in Russia called Ruby Brothers and were among the very first early adopters of Ruby and Ruby on Rails in our country. I ended up spending most of my career in a company called Wildbit.
I was born behind the Arctic Circle in Norilsk City in northern Siberia, and I have wanted to become a commercial pilot since I was a little kid. All of my hobbies revolved around airplanes one way or another, but for various reasons, I didn’t pursue it as a career option. Until 2011, when I saw an advertisement offering private pilot lessons at a local airfield back in Krasnoyarsk. I quickly jumped at the chance and started training.
My very first airplane was the Aeroprakt A-22 Foxbat, a tiny Ukrainian-made two-seater light sport airplane (LSA). My first flights were from a snow-covered airfield on an airplane equipped with skis. After that first flight, I haven’t stopped flying—I got hooked.
After moving to the United States, I decided to continue my education as a pilot. I joined a local flight school and got my Private Pilot certificate, this time flying a Cirrus SR20 advanced four-seater. As the years passed, I eventually got my Instrument Rating, Commercial Pilot, and Flight Instructor certificates and continued flying just for fun. It was nice to switch away from computers on the weekends and do something completely different.
I spent hundreds of hours flying my family all over the eastern seaboard of the United States in our little airplane, just having a blast. Even making it as far as flying from Doylestown, PA to Bahamas for vacation. Twice!
In 2022, I decided the time had come to make changes to my career and try doing something else for a living, to avoid having regrets later in life. So I flipped my life around: I became a full-time flight instructor and a part-time Ruby programmer. I spent some time teaching various folks how to fly safely, which was a very fulfilling phase of my new aviation career.
Eventually, after gaining enough experience as an instructor, I applied for a First Officer (co-pilot) position at an airline. In 2023, I transitioned to flying passenger jets full-time, fulfilling my lifelong childhood dream.
In 2025, I completed upgrade training at my company and became a Captain, which gave me the idea for this blog. There are hundreds of books for student pilots, and plenty of memoirs by retired captains with 30,000 hours looking back on the "golden age." But there is a gap in the literature. There is very little written for the pilot in the thick of the transition—the move from the support role of a First Officer to the decision-making role of a Captain.
This blog is my log of that transition.