Eyes in the Sky

NFlightCam, a company founded in 2010 by then-aerobatic instructor Patrick Carter, has been at the forefront of adapting action cameras for aviation use. The company has grown into an international firm with more than $2 million in annual sales and a list of innovative products that connect cameras to airplanes and record cockpit audio. Yet Carter has steadfastly resisted pressure to expand into larger, non-aviation pursuits or grow beyond a small core of dedicated employees and partners. He still develops and tests each new kind of camera mount personally—usually for many months—before manufacturing it or offering it for sale.

“Aviation is something I’ve been immersed in for most of my life and always felt passionate about,” says Carter. “Mountain bikes and race cars are nice, but I just don’t feel drawn to them in the same way I’m drawn to airplanes—so I’m the wrong guy to develop new products for cars and bikes.”

Carter owns and flies a Super Cub at the Lake Hood Seaplane Base near his home in Anchorage, Alaska, and he works as a pilot at Alaska Airlines flying Boeing 737s from nearby Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport. But the genesis of NFlight came in 2010 when Carter was laid off from Cessna in Wichita, Kansas, where he had worked as a production test pilot on airplanes ranging from the light sport Cessna 162 Skycatcher to the Citation XLS corporate jet.

“Losing your job makes you creative out of necessity,” he says. “There’s not really much of a choice.”

Carter was teaching aerobatics at the time in a Pitts S–2B, and the loud, cramped, high-stress cockpit made effective communication with students nearly impossible in the air. Attaching a small, streamlined action camera to the airplane, however, and reviewing video during post-flight debriefing sessions helped students understand what was happening in flight and make more rapid training progress.

Then, to add audio, he took a few cameras apart and soldered them in a headset cable attachment. He wasn’t sure it was possible, but it worked.

“At the next aerobatic contest, I sold a half-dozen cameras with audio cable attachments to other pilots,” Carter said. “Then I sent an email to John Zimmerman at Sporty’s [Pilot Shop] to let him know what I was doing, and he saw the potential immediately. Sporty’s ordered a dozen and then sold 100 the first day they were offered. It became pretty clear right then that NFlight was a viable business and getting into the Sporty’s catalog had been the tipping point.”

Carter grew up in Mountain Home, Arkansas, where his dad was a general aviation pilot. He worked at the local airport as a teen and quickly absorbed both flying and aircraft maintenance knowledge. He became a flight instructor at 19 and an A&P mechanic during college at Henderson State University where he studied aviation.

Carter learned CNC machining and 3D printing on his own. For manufacturing, however, he felt his best options were in China. So, in 2014, he traveled there for six weeks to meet in person with potential manufacturers. He rented an apartment in Shenzhen and returned there quarterly until the COVID-19 pandemic to supervise each production run of camera mounts and audio cables.

An early setback for NFlight was the bankruptcy of the company that made the Contour action camera—the platform on which all NFlight products were based at the time. Carter had no warning, and he had to decide whether to quit or develop new products for other action cameras.

GoPro was becoming the dominant action camera, and Carter adapted audio cables and mounts for its different form. He also focused on customer service and responded to the bulk of customer calls and emails personally.

“Contour’s disappearance was a real blow,” said Carter, who took out a second mortgage on his home to keep his business afloat. “Customer service became our competitive edge.”

Carter kept instructing and he also worked as a corporate contract pilot. In 2014, on a lark, he went to Alaska to fly for a summer at K2 Aviation in Talkeetna. There, he flew Cessna 185s and turbine de Havilland DHC–3 Otters on wheels, skis, and floats. He became enthralled by Alaska and moved there full-time.

There, he got close to another K2 employee, Courtney Martin, who later joined NFlight as director of operations. They started dating in 2017 and married in 2022.

Martin says she handles the “boring details” of running the business while Carter does the new-product-oriented “creative stuff.” But Carter credits Martin with a great deal of the company’s growth and profitability.

“She does the hard work, detailed planning, and she’s made many of the tough decisions that have allowed NFlight to become successful,” he says. “She’s incredibly organized and self-disciplined, and she puts her heart and soul into it.”

They also started NFlight Nomad, a sister company that converts consumer, off-the-shelf music headsets into low-cost, noise-cancelling units suitable for aviation. NFlight Nomad provides an FAA-certified, aviation microphone that clips on to each headset and provides outstanding sound quality and comfort in the cockpit. It also allows the headset to do double duty as a purely music headset when the owner isn’t flying (see “Product Review: NFlight Nomad Pro,” November 2023 AOPA Pilot).

NFlight Nomad provides an industry-leading return program as well as replacements for damaged headsets, and the Nomad has grown to surpass the camera mount division in revenue.

Carter and Martin moved to Homer, Alaska, in 2017, and he began flying for regional carrier Horizon Air. In 2022, he joined Alaska Airlines, so they moved to Anchorage in 2023 to be closer to his base.

Carter and Martin sold a majority share of NFlight in 2022, but Carter remains deeply involved in strategy, product design, and testing. Hunter Clark now runs the day-to-day business in San Diego, California.

“Flying for Alaska Airlines is something I really enjoy, especially our Alaskan route network,” Carter said. “It’s not a distraction from NFlight. It’s provided the stability that’s allowed the business to grow to the next level.”

Carter cringes at some of the foolish pilot antics that have been recorded on action cameras and widely shared online, such as the infamous staged crash by YouTuber Trevor Jacob that resulted in a six-month jail sentence and FAA certificate revocations.

Carter says the idiocy is offset, however, by the tremendous flight training benefits and inspiring aviation stories that are shared on many of the same channels.

Carter regularly attaches cameras to his Super Cub on flights throughout Alaska where he overflies glaciers, searches for wildlife, and lands at remote locations. His airplane is equipped with oversized tires that allow landing on gravel bars or snow. He’s collected and stored many hours of jaw-dropping video but rarely shares them, as his focus is on the performance of his products.

Unlike YouTube personalities who seek to gain attention through high-risk stunts, Carter says he tones things down when the cameras are on. His focus, he says, is on developing new mounts made from aviation-grade components that are easy and safe to use.

Most NFlight mounts, for example, are secured with hexagonal Allen wrenches instead of screwdrivers.

“The downside is people who use them have to remember to bring an Allen wrench,” he says. “The benefit is that the mounts are much more secure, and people who use them are way less likely to lose a camera.”

Carter says action cameras have become so refined and the technology has matured to the point that products that cost hundreds of dollars have features that “are almost as good as $250,000, gyro-stabilized, Cineflex cameras” used for high-end movies.

The next big advancements, he says, are likely to come in video editing software that makes the process easier, less time consuming, and shareable.

“We’ve come so far so fast in camera technology that it’s hard to envision major advancements in that area,” he said. “The biggest steps are likely to come in video editing.”

Personally, Carter said he never stops looking for ways to adapt existing technologies for aviation use—just as he did 14 years ago by finding a way to put action cameras with audio into airplane cockpits.

“I’m not an MIT-trained engineer, and I don’t have an unlimited budget to certify entirely new products,” he said. “What I can do is recognize new developments taking place outside the aviation industry and find ways to bring them in for the benefit of pilots.”

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