Hello! I'm Fernando, and this is my Logbook.
I fly a plane called Saoirse to places most people drive past, and I write about what, and who, I find when I get there. Not the view. The thing the view was hiding.
Every couple of weeks, a new story lands in your inbox. A written piece you can read with a cup of tea (or, like me, coffee) and a podcast episode if you’d rather hear the voices for yourself. It’s free. And you don’t need a plane, or any interest in planes, to come along. The flying is only how I happen to arrive.
A place pulls me there. The landscape, the history, the reason it's worth the flight. But the place is only ever the door. Sometimes the story is someone I meet when I land, who can tell me what living there is actually like. Sometimes it's the person in the seat beside me, and the reason they needed to go. And sometimes it's a question the place asks, and won't let me leave until I've had a go at answering.
The easiest way to know if this is for you is to read one. Try Looking for Zena, about a donkey sanctuary in Devon and a quiet question about love and direct debits. Or Before the Aeroplane, about getting children with cancer to hospital in Myanmar, before I ever flew anyone myself. Or The Yellow Lines, about the places that keep calling you back. If one of them lands with you, the rest will too.
Why I Fly
In 2004, my brother was diagnosed with cancer. He was 11. Watching my family navigate that, the fear, the exhaustion, the relentless weight of it, changed how I see the world. It also showed me what travel can do for people who badly need a break from their own lives.
That’s why in 2015 I founded Please Take Me There, a charity that has since helped over 8,000 children in war-affected zones reach life-saving medical care. And when I can, I use my own plane to give free flights to people who need some time away. From illness, from loneliness, from the weight of whatever they’re carrying. A few hours above the clouds can give you back something you didn’t know you’d lost.
The BBC and NBC have covered this work, and it was recognised at the BBC Make a Difference Awards. What I'm proudest of, though, is that some of my passengers have let me write their stories down afterwards, names changed if they'd rather. All I really did was listen.
Before all this
Before any of the flying, I trained at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama and spent over a decade in theatre, at the Royal Ballet and Opera, the Royal Albert Hall, the Barbican Centre, and a regional theatre I opened in my hometown. I think that work shaped how I tell stories now. The instinct to find the moment that matters, to give it space, and to trust the audience to feel it.
One more thing
While the Logbook is small enough to allow it, anyone subscribed can book a fifteen-minute call with me. Tell me about a journey that changed something for you. I’d genuinely like to hear it, and some of those conversations end up in the Logbook. You can also ask me about anywhere I’ve written about, there’s always more than makes it into the piece.
If you’re planning a trip and want to think it through with someone who does this a lot, bring that. I won’t pretend to know everywhere, but I know how to plan a journey worth taking.
So that’s the Logbook. The places I land, and the people I find there. Subscribe, and I’ll save you a seat.
P.S. One thing, since it matters more than it used to. Everything here actually happened, exactly as I tell it. The words are mine, and so are the photographs and the sounds. Including the donkey that ignored me for twenty minutes.
