A look back, a look forward.

"This would be an awesome spot to bleed out." - Filming Knightweave Cloaks vs. Thermal Drones, January 2025.

I always think to myself “I should write more blog posts” because sometimes I want to yell my ideas into the void without the hassle of filming and editing it. Why I find it harder to sit down and just type things out rather than film them is anyone’s guess, but here we are.

It’s the first day of the new year. Year three of stumbling my way to success when it comes to North Wind Aerial, and no amount of “hey we actually really like you and what you’re doing” will tamp down my impostor syndrome. The past year has been a hell of a ride, and has brought such incredible adventures with it. Adventures that have brought me to the burned streets of Los Angeles on my first campaign fire deployment, lonesome roads in the Mendocino that I and half my team nearly left our breakfasts on the side of after extricating a vehicle crash fatality that had been baking in the sun for a month, a 1 a.m. wildfire burning on both sides of a creek near a city with no air support except for myself, and mud soaked hills in the pitch black of night with the only illumination being the spotlights from our M30T Drones.

Fighting a flare up in Mandeville Canyon during the Los Angeles Fires of 2025.

This was the year I finally started to feel like I didn’t just know what I was doing, I began to feel as though I was comfortable enough with my life experience to actually begin to lead and make decisions and write tactical doctrines and stand by them when challenged, admit when I was wrong, and not revel in the glory when I was right. I don’t think the feelings of inferiority will ever truly go away, but 2025 truly helped cement the feelings in my own mind that I know what I’m doing, and what I’m doing is the right thing.

Not all of these are field mission related. A lot of it has to do with what I’m doing right now, sitting behind a computer. I put out a lot of videos that I’m truly proud of this year, and not all of them were even on my channel. I also got to collab with a lot of really awesome other people and organizations.

Juan and I lrn 2 solder.

"Don't put your fingers over the cylinder gap." - Travis

Starting the year off seeing how firearms look in

Car and Bike Show with Julia.

thermal imaging with my buddy Travis was so much fun. There’s so many videos we want to work on together, but both of us being busy farming dads makes that pretty difficult. Finally getting my buddy Juan on felt the same way as we attempted to learn to solder in order to build an FPV drone from a Joshua Bardwell kit. We’ll finish that someday, I’m sure.

Bringing on Julia to help as an editor, only for her to find a place as my cameraman, manager, producer, and channel partner instead has allowed us to do so much of the projects around our home town that I haven’t been able to beforehand. It hasn’t lightened my load much, but I’ve loved being able to give back more.

Working closely with the guys from Eagle Eyes, Automated Drone Image Analysis Tool, and Nova has been one of the best parts of this whole thing however. All of the teams behind these incredible pieces of software deserve the best. In a world so caught up in making the most money while delivering the minimum viable product, seeing such amazing people truly pouring their hearts and souls into products designed to minimize suffering, bring missing people back home, and plan for emergencies has been a breath of fresh air. I am eternally grateful to these teams for letting me represent their software in my own little way by making videos on how to use them.

No more so than the guys and gals at Nova, who for whatever reason saw a weird Northern California farmboy making videos about finding clothes with their software and decided the next best course of action was to meet up for dinner in a restaurant with the windows literally held together by tape during a hail storm and listen to him ramble about the videos they should be making, and then to walk out of said meeting and instead of blacklisting my Nova account, invite him to make videos directly for their company. Rob, Daan, Rachael, and all of the others, your friendship and willingness to let me do what I do for Nova means the world to me. And never forget, it’s Liam’s fault.

Meeting Daan and Liam from Nova

Looking ahead to 2026, my schedule is already jam-packed. I have barely scratched the surface when it comes to delving into my Matrice 4T due to all the tule fog that’s saturated our airspace. I have two sponsored videos to film as soon as I get home from the vacation I’m typing this up on. Julia and I have two full documentaries to plan for Laugh Productions. I’m currently cementing plans to visit a fellow SAR Drone Pilot up in the North West portion of my state to discuss how we can work together on helping Missing and Murdered Indigenous Persons, as well as and old military friend to test out just how well Eagle Eyes and the M4T AI algorithms can locate military personnel. Ideally, I’ll make a trip to Canada to visit the Eagle Eyes and Nova teams as well. All while trying to be a good farmer, husband, and father.

9 Hours on the wildfire line later, providing drone coverage the entire time.

It’s a good thing I like to stay busy.

In the meantime, I’m going to enjoy my final dinner on vacation here in beautiful New Mexico. Green Chile Cheeseburgers enjoyed with some of our closest friends. It’s been an incredible two weeks outside of the sinus infection, but I’m ready to get home and back to filming.

Thanks for being a part of this ride y’all.

• Tim

  

  Enjoying the vistas and aura farming in Ribera, New Mexico.