Jon Kotwicki is your man.
The former owner of a flight school in Florida, Kotwicki knows a wild hair when he sees it. He, too, left the relatively simple confines of the Sunshine State to pursue a new life in the Last Frontier, starting a flight school in Big Lake, Alaska, and flight instructing through YouTube videos. Even his mother was skeptical.
“Only you would think you could actually do this and then actually do it,” she said to him on her one and only trip from Florida to Alaska.
Not only did Kotwicki leave the warmth for the wilderness, buy 115 acres nearly sight unseen, carve out two gravel runways, and build some cabins for his prospective students, he let his imagination run amuck. “Wouldn’t it be cool if we got an old airplane and turned it into a house?”