Go Fly Stories

We took professional travel photographer and filmmaker Matt Pierce for a private, doors-off photography flight around Maui. Here’s a video of his experience.

Photography didn’t find its way into Nick Moran’s life until a few years after he and his wife, Magen, moved in 2010 from the Pacific Northwest to Maui.

“After the move, I worked first as a kitesurfing/standup paddle instructor while accumulating enough flight time to get a full-time pilot job,” he says.

“I’d earned my helicopter flight instructor certificate right before we moved to Hawaii.

“My dad was in the Navy and I flew airplanes growing up, so aviation is in my blood.”

“When asked if I needed to bring anything specific along with me for our photography flight, Nick Moran responded, ‘Wear a pair of closed-toe shoes, and just be ready for adventure.’

“With those being the only two requirements, along with an eagerness to snap some awesome aerial photos, I was more than ready for my flight with Go Fly Maui.”

We’re half a mile off Maui’s northern coastline when Nick Moran says the magic words: “My hands aren’t on the controls. You’re flying all by yourself.”

I glance to my left, where Moran is seated in the pilot’s chair of the helicopter, and his hands are completely removed from the cyclic, which helps to control the chopper.

“There’s no way,” I think to myself, “that I’m actually flying this thing.”

To see if it’s true I grab the cyclic and gently push it forward, and sure enough, just as Moran said it would, the helicopter changes its pitch, and an empowering sense of aerial freedom is now in the palm of my hands.