oe Gilroy's last flight as a Delta Airlines captain landed at Atlanta-Hartsfield on March 6, 2026. He had just crossed the Atlantic from Dublin on an A330. The tower gave him an unexpected runway assignment. The landing was not what he had planned. He wouldn't trade a second of it.

In this episode, Dan Gill sits down with Joe two months into his retirement for a career retrospective that covers every era of commercial aviation. Joe started flying for money in a Cessna 172 rigged with a billboard and a belt of mercury-charged lights, circling the Capitol Beltway at night until Andrews Air Force Base shut him down for causing a UFO scare. He ended his career as a captain on the Airbus A350 and A330, with stops along the way on the Lockheed Electra, the Boeing 727, the A320, and the development teams for both the 787 and A350.

This conversation covers the stories you don't usually hear — the bar conversation that led to his Republic Airlines job, getting switched from the Convair to the 727 on his first day of class, watching Top Gun at a matinee before a night simulator session, the DB Cooper legend and what it built into every 727 ever made, and what it actually felt like to watch the northern lights from an A330 flight deck over the North Atlantic.

Joe also talks about what he's building now. Speedway Flight Training in Hampton, Georgia started as a flying club called Happy Goat in 2016. Today it's a full flight school with a scholarship fund that puts non-traditional high school students in the cockpit, no cost to them, with a full pathway to an aviation university and a professional pilot career.

His message to the next generation: be humble, be grateful, and never forget that fewer than 1 percent of people on this planet get to do what you do.

🎧 Speedway Flight Training: speedwayft.com🎓 Scholarship Fund: speedwayscholarship.com📍 Right Rudder Marketing: rightruddermarketing.com