TaylorWelka

Director of Information Technology at FlyHouse. A dozen years in aviation.Storm chaser when the sky allows.

I work on the part of aviation you can’t see from the cabin window.

Behind every private flight is a stack of systems that has to agree with itself: scheduling, crews, maintenance, the network, identities, the data. When it works, nobody notices. I’m Director of Information Technology at FlyHouse, with about twelve years in aviation behind me.

What keeps me interested is how complex systems actually behave — not on an architecture diagram, but at five in the morning, when one dependency fails and three departments feel it. Good technology makes that moment rarer, shorter and less surprising. That’s most of the job.

I live in Northeast Ohio, near Cleveland. When I’m not working, I’m usually watching the sky.

Five operators.

My aviation career runs through the airlines — Delta, United and American — and into private aviation, first with Flexjet and now with FlyHouse.

The airlines are a lesson in scale: thousands of departures a day, where a small outage casts a very long shadow. Private aviation is a lesson in precision: every trip is individual, and a system failure lands on one specific person’s day.

Along the way the work moved from fixing things, to designing the environments they run in, to deciding what those environments should become.

Civil Air Patrol cadet, 2012

Delta Air Lines
United Airlines
American Airlines
Flexjet
FlyHouseDirector of Information Technology — now

Information technology
Enterprise infrastructure
Aviation systems
IT operations
Cybersecurity
Technology strategy
Leadership

In private aviation, there’s no such thing as “just an IT issue.”

A password reset can be a delayed departure. A sync failure can be a crew at the wrong airport. A bad backup can be a lost week. So I judge technology decisions by what they do to the operation — not by how they look in a demo.

The first departure of the day leaves on time.
Infrastructure
Networks, identity, endpoints and cloud — built plainly, documented well, boring in the best way. The load-bearing layer has to work at 5 a.m. on a holiday.
A crew knows exactly where it’s going tomorrow.
Aviation systems
Scheduling, flight operations, maintenance tracking and the integrations between them. Most problems live in the seams, so that’s where the attention goes.
A bad night stays a bad night.
Resilience
Backups that actually restore, failover that has been tested, recovery plans people have rehearsed. Business continuity is a practice, not a binder.
A passenger’s information stays theirs.
Cybersecurity
Security as an operating condition rather than a project: identity first, least privilege, and the assumption that someone is always trying the door.
Growth doesn’t require a rebuild.
Strategy
Choosing technology by its operational consequence, and building environments that scale with the fleet instead of fighting it.

A wall cloud hanging beneath a dark storm base over open farmland near Pontiac, Illinois.

WelkaWX

Formerly TwistedWXPontiac, Illinois — March 10, 2026

Outside of aviation, I chase storms.

I pick a target the night before, drive to it, and point a camera at whatever the atmosphere does once I get there. It started as TwistedWX. It’s becoming WelkaWX — the same work, under my own name.

The habit is older than the career. In 2014 I was administering web servers for a regional weather forecasting company, and I’ve been reading the sky with one eye ever since.

Forecasting: The target gets picked the night before. Everything after that is driving, watching and adjusting.
The field: Ohio to the Plains — Illinois, Indiana, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Kansas and Nebraska.
Live coverage: Chases are announced ahead of time and streamed live on YouTube.
Science: In April 2026 I joined WxEye for the RISE-26 balloon launch in Bloomington, Illinois.
This season: The Enid, Oklahoma EF4 in April. A tornado intercept near St. Libory, Nebraska in May.