“To share the history of innovation with the minds of tomorrow.”
Looking across the tarmac at one of my favorite aircraft, literally out of reach for so many kids. I’d dreamed of flying here so many times – Nova Hall (2026)
Why is Flying Over Time?
There are moments in childhood when a dream doesn’t die dramatically. It fades quietly.
Mine faded in classrooms.
Not because I lacked fascination or imagination, but because of small signals repeated over time — comments about math, subtle redirection, the quiet assumption that aviation and aerospace belonged to someone else. Other students seemed to get encouragement toward engineering and science while I slowly absorbed the idea that I probably wasn’t built for that world.
The strange part was that airplanes consumed my imagination.
I could sit for hours studying wings, looking at night bomber fuselages, and my favorite the F-16 Falcon. Long before I understood equations, I understood shapes that created lift. I could see airflow in my mind before I could explain it on paper. Aircraft didn’t intimidate me — they made sense to me in a way few other things did.
Yet no teacher ever pulled me aside and said, “You belong in this.”
Even growing up in Sedona, Arizona, not far from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, no advisor, teacher, or adult ever pointed me toward aviation as a real future. Somewhere along the way, I internalized the idea that flight belonged to wealthier people, smarter people, or simply other people. So I quietly let the dream drift away while pretending I hadn’t.
Then my father intervened.
An aerospace engineer himself, he decided the system was wrong about me.
Instead of beginning with formulas and gatekeeping, he began with curiosity. We sat together studying Jane’s All the World’s Aircraft. He taught me aerodynamics, structural dynamics, and thermodynamics through stories, diagrams, and real airplanes. He showed me aviation as something alive — not as an academic wall designed to keep people out.
For the first time, learning felt electric.
One of the moments that changed me most was walking with him through the library at Northern Arizona University. Shelf after shelf of aviation research surrounded us. It felt like discovering a hidden world I had somehow always been searching for without knowing how to enter it. Years later, after uncovering my grandfather’s role in inventing transcontinental flight, holding Donald Hall’s original engineering papers, airfoil models, and blueprints from the Spirit of St. Louis project, I finally understood what my father recognized long before anyone else did:
Passion comes first.
Not every future engineer looks like an engineer at age fifteen. Not every future pilot thrives in a traditional classroom. Sometimes the difference between a life pursued and a life abandoned is simply whether one adult recognizes the spark before it disappears.
That realization became one of the foundations for Flying Over Time. Well beyond the Spirit of St. Louis.
Because somewhere right now there is a kid staring out an airport fence, convinced aviation belongs to somebody else.
And they are wrong.
– Nova Hall, grandson and co-Founder