Over the past three weeks I took eight flights, totaling up to 50 hours. I spent one week away from my wife and kids on a work trip in Australia, one week with them on a holiday in Malaysia, and then made another emergency trip home to South Africa to take care of some affairs and visit my parents and friends as well.

As an AvGeek, it was awesome. I got to fly on five different aircraft types, I got to try one new aircraft type and one new airline. I also got to visit a bucket list lounge for the first time.

But as a dad, it’s been difficult to be away from my kids. In Malaysia, my son was crawling around, but when I got back from South Africa, he was walking. I missed that.

This tension is something I struggle with. I am a self-proclaimed AvGeek from the OG days. The first flight I took in my retrievable memory was in June 2002. We got to fly a Singapore Airlines Boeing 747-400, dubbed ‘MegaTop’. The 9-hour flight from Johannesburg to Singapore took forever for a little 10-year-old boy, but the excitement of getting in a tube and flying high above the clouds outweighed the weird uncomfortable feeling of ears popping and zombified jet lagged behaviour.

But the trip sparked something within me. Why was it called ‘Megatop’ when the second leg of our trip was on the ‘Jubilee’? Who were these beautiful looking ladies looking after us on the plane? What exactly is a terminal and why is there a Terminal 1 and Terminal 2?

Down the rabbit hole I went. My dad travelled a lot and I got a collection of paperback timetables and inflight magazines, most of which are still stacked in the corner of my wardrobe back home. My most prized possessions are still my assortment of amenity kits I begged off my dad or from overseas guests who succumbed to my weird gift requests.

I started drawing planes, designing my own liveries and fantasy airline lounges (which I never got to enter into). I uploaded hundreds of designs on Cardatabase’s aviation designs in my teenage years. We weren’t wealthy and a career as a pilot would never be on the cards for me.

I studied Finance followed by an MBA, and my dream of starting my own airline clashed with reality. I did manage to write and publish a paper on Flight Delays as my graduating paper, but knowing whatever goes behind running an airline not only gained my respect but made me realize that my little hobby would never become more than that. I got married, had kids, and life carried on. While the aviation world was at a standstill, I started my database of airline livery history and played airline simulator games, wishing that flights could return to normal.

Fast forward a few years to being a dad with a full-time job, and I am still proud to be an AvGeek. I now find myself in Hong Kong, an airport city with a rich aviation culture and history. I am fortunate enough to see Boeing 747s still flying in the sky, though they are mostly cargo types.

After travelling for three weeks, I realize that maybe I still have something within me that can make a difference to the AvGeek world. I won’t be able to score airline miles and fly first class. Even if I had enough miles, the redemption tickets are always blocked out in the school holidays anyway.

But being an AvGeek dad has been so rewarding for me. With all four grandparents living in different countries than us, we had to take the kids to visit them. My daughter is at an age where she starts to recognize different coloured planes, looking up at the sky to search for them when we walk to school. Her newest fascination is folding paper jets - it keeps her entertained. I had to explain to her once that our plane didn’t have TVs and an inflight meal because we flew low-cost instead of full service. I just hope that one day she will realize how fortunate she was to fly so many times already at such a young age.

I realize that the meaning of being an AvGeek may have changed. Some may think that it is all about flying in First and Business class, but there is still a select few of us that just like planes. We check the registration and tail numbers and bump into people when we look up at the sky. We pay attention to the weirdest detail that an everyday person would overlook and we geek out about plane liveries or make our own.

Of course, I am extremely grateful to the many influencers that popped up over the years and brought the aviation industry to the forefront of our lives, but most of us are incredibly happy just to fly Economy class and that shouldn’t stop anyone from being an AvGeek.

I don’t fly a lot, and it took me a long time to make peace with it. When I do fly, I tend to fly economy or the quickest way to keep everyone in my family sane. But I hope that as I’m busy typing this on my iPad sitting on my couch after I’ve just put my kids to bed on a Friday night after a long week, I can bring a little bit of my AvGeek spark to those who can’t fly every week, but still call themselves AvGeeks.

I have no idea where this will lead me, but I hope I can write whenever I can. I’m planning to write in three sections (don’t ask why I chose G, it just worked):

• The Geek Seat: where we can just all geek out about plane stuff

• The Boarding Gate: where I can write about the occasional flight I had or my opinion on passenger experiences

• The Ground Lounge: where I’ll try and put my MBA skills to good use and write about recent developments in the industry.

All of this is from the perspective of an AvGeek Dad on the Ground, so welcome aboard AvDOG.

Cabin crew, please be seated for takeoff.

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