Ethan Paschkes

15 · student glider pilot · New York

I build apps.
Mostly about planes.

I'm Ethan. I fly gliders and I have four apps on the App Store. The main one, Apex Sky, lets you catch the real plane going over your head and then fly it. 3,700 people have played it so far. I also got ChatGPT running on a TI-84 calculator.

Get Apex Sky See the apps ChatGPT on a calculator
Ethan Paschkes on a balcony by the sea, an airliner passing overhead
Fig. 1 Yes, there is a plane in the photo. There is always a plane.

On the App Store

The apps

Apex Sky app icon

My main one · since August 2026

Apex Sky

See a real plane. Catch it. Then fly it.

Real planes, flying right now, over where you are, in 3D. Catch one and it goes in your hangar. Then you fly that type yourself, over real terrain, into real airports with runways, taxiways and gates from FAA data. It works with no signal, so you can play it on an actual flight.

New aircraft or a mission almost every week. This fall: water landings, aircraft carriers with arrestor wires, and the 1549 "Miracle on the Hudson" mission.

  • 3,728players
  • 1,258downloads in a week
  • 150+aircraft
  • 200real airports
App Store Tester Discord 3-minute demo
Updraft app icon

For glider pilots

Updraft: Glider Training

Learn to fly. Log every hour.

Put your phone on the coaming and press record. It finds your launch and landing by itself off the barometer and GPS, then you replay the flight over real terrain and it goes in your logbook. Everything is saved on the phone, because there is no signal at an airfield and a logbook that loses flights is useless.

I made this because real flight computers cost hundreds to thousands of dollars and I'm a student.

  • Works offline
  • IGC files
  • Drills
  • Free to record
App Store Support
Fair Fare app icon

Not about planes

Fair Fare

Know what your food really costs.

Take a photo of your food and it prints you a receipt. Every ingredient with an estimated supermarket price, the recipe, and a grocery list. It asks you questions before it guesses. There is also a buffet mode that tells you if your plate beat the entry price.

  • One photo
  • Reads menus and checks
  • Buffet mode
App Store

On the App Store · physics game

Egg Drop Engineer

The school egg drop, as a game. Build a contraption from foam, parachutes, springs and rockets, drop it, and let the physics decide. 132 levels across 21 places. On the Moon there is no air, so parachutes do nothing.

App Store

TestFlight beta · up next

StudyScroll

Insta, but for studying. A feed of quick questions from your actual classes, for the time you would have spent scrolling.

Join the beta@studyscroll.learn

Side projects · hardware and open source

Things I built because nobody stopped me

Open source · MIT · written in C

CalcGPT: ChatGPT on a TI-84

A TI-84 Plus CE graphing calculator that talks to ChatGPT. It started over a USB cable. Then I wired in an ESP32-S3 chip that the calculator powers itself, so now it's wireless. On October 29 it answered a question at school through a phone hotspot with no computer anywhere near it.

It also has an equation solver, a web browser, a video player, and a phone-style home screen. ChatGPT can use 24 tools on it, like drawing a to-scale triangle on the calculator screen.

  • TI-84 Plus CE
  • ESP32-S3 Wi-Fi
  • 24 AI tools
  • Equation solver
Code on GitHub

GitHub

Meta glasses voice bridge

Say a command to Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses and it runs on your Mac. An iOS app plus a small Python listener.

GitHub

Tools

The small helpers I ended up needing: a live render viewer, terrain downloads, flyby sound, 3D model tools. One folder each.

In progress

Legible

An app that reads messy handwritten math, with a small AI model that learns one person's handwriting. The model runs on the iPad itself.

App Store

What players say

“The best catching planes game I have ever played.”

App Store review, Apex Sky

“A great way to entertain kids on a plane, particularly at the airport spotting planes.”

App Store review, Apex Sky

“I know it's laggy but I still love it.”

App Store review, Apex Sky

US App Store, November 5, 2026. The three 5s are from a handful of ratings so far. The laggy part is real and I'm working on it.

Process

How I actually build

01

I use AI to write the code.

Not going to pretend otherwise. I decide what gets built, I test it, and when it breaks I figure out why. Apex Sky is 330,000 lines of TypeScript with over 10,000 automated tests, so a fix can't quietly break something else.

02

Measure first. Then fix.

1,450 numbered bugs in the log so far. The ones that got fixed for real were the ones I measured before touching anything. Aircraft numbers come from real sources, not from what feels right.

03

Test it where it will be used.

An airfield has no bars. A plane has no wifi. So the apps have to work offline, and I test them in the glider and on real flights, not just on my desk.

04

Ship it, then listen.

Apex Sky has been updated almost every week since launch. Most of what changed came from testers on the Discord hitting stuff I never would have found. If you find a bug, tell me. I read all of them.

05

Look at the numbers.

I track where players come from and where they quit. One finding: people who catch a plane, fly it and land it on day one come back 74% of the time. So that is what I'm building the first minute of the game around.

06

Build the thing I wanted.

Every app started as something I wanted and couldn't find, or couldn't afford. That's the whole strategy. It turns out other people wanted them too.

2026 so far

Flight log

  1. First line of Apex Sky

    The first commit. Three and a half months before launch.

  2. Apex Sky goes live on the App Store

    My first app on the store. 1,100 commits and counting.

  3. Fair Fare ships

    Then Updraft ten days later, on September 24.

  4. Egg Drop Engineer ships

    App number four. 132 levels, from a desk to the edge of the Sun.

  5. Congressional App Challenge

    Entered Apex Sky. Also entered Seton Hall's Pirates Pitch, and the Conrad Challenge with a team, in aerospace and aviation.

  6. CalcGPT goes open source

    ChatGPT on a TI-84, wireless, on GitHub under the MIT license.

  7. 1,258 downloads in a week

    Ten times the week before. 3,728 players by November 5.

About

The short version

I'm Ethan Paschkes. I'm 15, I live in New York, and I'm a student glider pilot. You can solo a glider at 14, years before you can drive, which is still the best rule I know of.

I started making apps at 14 because the stuff I wanted didn't exist, or cost more than a 14 year old can pay. Apex Sky came out in August 2026. Fair Fare, Updraft and Egg Drop Engineer came after it. I run the tester Discord, read every crash report, and post plane videos on YouTube as Hypersonic Industries: 2,500 subscribers and 650,000 views.

When I'm not on the laptop I'm at the airfield.

A recorded glider flight replayed over real terrain in Updraft
Fig. 2 One of my flights, replayed in Updraft.

Quick answers

Questions people ask

Who is Ethan Paschkes?

A 15-year-old app developer and student glider pilot from New York. I have four apps on the App Store, including Apex Sky, a 3D flight game with more than 3,700 players, and I published CalcGPT, an open-source project that runs ChatGPT on a TI-84 Plus CE calculator.

What is Apex Sky?

A free 3D flight game for iPhone and iPad. It shows the real aircraft flying near you from live flight data. You catch them into a collection, then fly that aircraft type over real terrain and real airports. It launched on August 30, 2026, has more than 150 aircraft, and is rated 4.7 stars on the US App Store.

What apps have you made?

Apex Sky (flight game), Updraft: Glider Training (flight recorder and logbook), Fair Fare (what restaurant food costs to make) and Egg Drop Engineer (physics game) are on the App Store. StudyScroll is in TestFlight beta. CalcGPT is the calculator one.

Do you really use AI to write the code?

Yes. AI writes most of the code. I decide what gets built, design it, test it on real devices and real flights, and run the debugging. That part is the actual job: 1,450 numbered bugs and more than 10,000 automated tests so far.

Why does the App Store show a different developer name?

I'm under 18, so Apple needs the apps published under a parent's developer account. I design, build and maintain all of them.

How do I reach you?

DM @ep_pilot on Instagram, connect on LinkedIn, or join the Discord.

Contact

Say hi

Bugs, ideas, a plane you caught, or gliders. DM me.