Imagine being past the hard part and turning your nearly finished airplane over to McCormick and his well-trained staff to put the cherry red on your sundae. Finally, it’s time to fly—and turn some heads.

What started as a desire to offer more elaborate schemes has since become Evoke Aviation and Evoke Aircraft Design, the graphic design portion of the business. Evoke’s portfolio includes more than 50 EAA AirVenture award-winning homebuilts, such as Steve Thorne’s (“Flight Chops” on YouTube) Van’s RV-14.

“I would say our customers are people who want to be able to show off a little bit of their personality,” McCormick said.

• READ MORE: Why Are So Many Airplanes Painted White?

When meeting the Evoke team at AirVenture in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, I was greeted by youthful faces and tattooed limbs. These folks looked like me, and I was excited to learn about additional career opportunities in aviation. There are more obvious routes, such as becoming a mechanic or delving into engineering or marketing, but graphic design was something I’d never really thought about, let alone aircraft painting.

“It’s very cool to be able to not only design the airplane, but work in a facility on-site where that design is then put on the airplane, and you can have input as it’s all being created and basically coming to life,” McCormick said. “I think it’s a very cool niche for the designers to get into.”

The Prep

McCormick was able to establish the foundation for what would become his own design company and paint shop—located at Northeast Alabama Regional Airport (KGAD)—by aiming to fill a need and taking every necessary step to do so. He’s always been entrepreneurial. He started a DJ business in high school that he worked all throughout college, where he studied auto collision repair. He knew that focus would be a gateway to custom painting.

After graduating with a technical certificate, he landed a job at International Jets, an aircraft paint facility in Gadsden. He fell in love with airplanes and worked to fine-tune his skill during a time when paint schemes weren’t all that exciting.

“I always knew that I could do better,” he said. “I was always so frustrated by what I was painting, and I just knew I could create better designs. And so that’s where the idea started.”

Around 2011, work sent McCormick to Nigeria for a year to manage a project. During his downtime he created a business plan for his own design company, Plane Schemer, which was rebranded to Evoke Aircraft Design in 2021 to better align with his paint shop, Evoke Aviation. Upon his return, he launched a website and put together enough money for a booth at the Sun ’n Fun Aerospace Expo in Lakeland, Florida. He didn’t have a lot of designs to show, but was able to persuade a few people to work with him. Shortly after, he was able to quit his day job of painting airplanes and focus on building his own brand.

• READ MORE: Giving Your Airplane a Face-Lift and Tummy Tuck

A few years later, International Jets went out of business, and McCormick acquired its hangar, allowing him to offer not only schemes but paint jobs as well. Now with complete control over the quality of the finished product, he could focus on taking Evoke paint jobs to the next level by using the highest quality materials and procedures.

“The majority of our labor hours goes into the body work and the prep and getting it ready for paint, and actually the paint is one of the easiest parts,” he said. “So 65 percent of the budget goes into the actual prepping of the airplane, and then the rest of it goes into the paint and the finish work and the reassembly.”

The Primer

McCormick manages 20 employees across both businesses—five designers and the rest paint-and-body-work technicians. He said he hires people who take pride in their work and want to do better for themselves. That positive company culture has attracted capable employees who produce quality work, and McCormick feels this is what has allowed his business to grow so quickly.

As with every aviation business, hiring and retention has proven difficult at times, so Evoke does a lot of recruiting to combat those challenges. This is the main reason its employee average age is low. Additionally, McCormick believes it’s easier to hire and train from scratch, rather than try to retrain experienced designers and technicians.

“We can teach exactly the way we want everything done from the very beginning, and there’s no bad habits to get rid of,” he said.

Sammy Davis, one of McCormick’s first employees, now serves as Evoke’s senior designer. Davis set out to study graphic design in college but switched her major from art to business after her first year.

She was originally hired to help from a business standpoint as she not only majored in it but had interned at a software and systems engineering company, where she absorbed a lot of valuable information that would help make Evoke scalable for the future. Davis went to Sun ’n Fun with McCormick for his big debut and got to ride in an Aero L-39 Albatros.

“That was my first-ever plane ride, and I was like, ‘OK, I would like to be a part of this, please,’” said Davis, noting the Lakeland trip served as her introduction to aviation and she is now the only pilot on the Evoke staff.

Due to an increase in sales and McCormick being pulled in different directions, Davis decided to learn scheme design. She said she watched McCormick and asked a lot of questions.

“You have to be patient and a little bit hardheaded,” she said.

Davis pointed out that repetition was key, and eventually she got the green light to start working with clients. She’s been at it for seven years, but said a lot has changed in that time.

“Schemes back then were not as elaborate as they are now for the most part because the trend hadn’t quite kicked off yet,” she said. “So back then it was just like, OK, well here’s a really simple prompt, maybe a two-tone. Someone wants a white base and like a red bottom with a stripe in the middle. OK, well that’s easy enough. You do that and then you send it off to them, you do your edits, and then you try a top view. OK, well now you try the wings, and you would think something shaped as a rectangle wouldn’t be as challenging as it is, but there’s a lot of curves and 3D forms to think about.”

Customers initiate the design process by filling out a survey that covers preferred styles, colors, and paint finishes. They are also asked to send in reference photos of what they like. In addition, it’s helpful if designers know at what stage their customer is at in their build and what their mission is—do they want to win an award, or are they looking for something more practical? The designers work with their clients, whether it be over the phone, through Zoom calls, or in person, to finalize the scheme. This can take weeks, months, or years, and sometimes upward of 50 renderings to complete.

At any given time, designers can host a Zoom meeting with their client to talk through design changes. Both Davis and McCormick called this a fun activity because clients are impressed by how quickly Evoke’s designers can make changes—since they know all the shortcuts—and it’s exciting for the customer to see them carve out their airplane’s final form. Customers can also invite friends and family to join. Screen sharing also saves Evoke a lot of phone calls.

“You can cut down so much time,” Davis said. “You can cut down weeks of back-and-forth by doing a Zoom session, honestly. Because they can see their ideas in real time, and they can visualize it, and they can also ask technical questions that they might not think of when they’re dialing a response back.”

Evoke also reduced the number of checkup phone calls it receives by developing an online portal for customers to track lead times.

“Once you initiate a design with us, you get on the paint schedule, you get a Signature Series number assigned to you, and then as the airplanes are completed, we have an online portal that you sign into,” McCormick said. “It has your number, where you’re at in line, what your current wait time and estimated drop-off date is, and then you can also see the planes that are in progress, and you see the planes as they’re being finished. So it’s like this interactive system that you have access to once you get on the schedule.”

The Paint

Dakota Jennings, another one of McCormick’s first hires, works as a paint technician, having gotten his start studying auto collision repair, just like McCormick. Jennings was able to perfect his craft under McCormick’s tutelage, working through unfamiliar tasks diligently until he got it right.

“He showed me how he does it, and then he let me do it,” Jennings said. “He never wanted to do it for me. And once I get it, I’ve always got it,”

Jennings enjoys everything about his job, from hand-striping lines to creating his own colors for fades. Like many of the other team members, he fell in love with aviation and was excited to tell his college peers he works on airplanes.

“It was like my calling to be in the aviation industry,” he said. “I really could be doing something else, but I really enjoy being here and being…I guess you could call it an artist.”

When asked what makes a good aircraft painter, McCormick said it’s all about a strong skill set rather than just having the right tools.

“I believe that to paint to the quality that we’re doing is a 100 percent skill,” he said. “At Oshkosh I do a seminar and I tell exactly how we do every single step of our paint process. There’s no secrets. There’s nothing proprietary about the way we do things. We just do everything to a degree and with the skill set that is almost impossible to replicate without having the team of people we’ve been able to build and put together here.”

The Finished Product

Your airplane is painted. Now how do you maintain it?

Evoke has created a line of cleaning products, called the Signature Shine Series, that allows customers to take a little bit of luxury with them when they leave the facility. McCormick worked with one of his clients who owns a company that specializes in product development, manufacturing, and packaging to create the line of supplies for Evoke.

“It’s not meant to be a really big sector of our business, but it is very cool when we’re finished with an airplane to be able to continue our involvement in their paint job,” he said.

At AirVenture, Evoke brings a team to detail airplanes all week, so if your homebuilt was painted by Evoke and you fly it to Oshkosh, you’ll get the royal treatment.

Now that McCormick has built his empire, he works seven days a week to maintain it.

“Not to micromanage, but just to manage to a degree where we’re never compromising our quality,” he said. “That quality, attention to detail, and pride in what we do is the biggest reason our product has grown to become so popular.”

He’s proud to be quite involved in every aspect of the company. So how does he continue to improve?

“I think I’m intuitive, but I also try to learn from people who have done it before,” McCormick said. “It never hurts to pick up a book about business management and [study] how to communicate more effectively as a leader. It’s worth going through books, even if there’s one sentence or phrase in that entire book that becomes valuable, and it’s something you can implement in your day to day, and just stacking those skills and learning to communicate better and to be a more effective leader.”

For more information on Evoke Aviation, call 256-490-1541 or visit www.evokeaviation.com and www.evokeaircraftdesign.com.

This feature first appeared in the Summer 2024 Ultimate Issue print edition.

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“Today, I’m not only going to give you the problems, I’m going to give you the solutions.” When a pilot hears those words from an instructor before launching into a flight review—what can be a pedestrian exercise at best—that pilot knows this session will be different.

Steve Thorne didn’t have to fly all the way from Ontario to Atlanta to get a decent flight review—but he was compelled to by the potential for adventure and greater learning. He’s known to many as the founder of Flight Chops, the “weekend warrior” on YouTube who flies for his own satisfaction, representing for many pilots a reflection of themselves. He’s relatable, humble, and genuinely interested in the Flight Chops motto: “Practice. Review. Improve.”

Thorne teamed up with flight instructor and retired Delta captain Dan Gryder to take the flight review that could change Thorne’s approach to flying for good. In the subsequent video released on the Flight Chops YouTube channel, Gryder examines the four big failure areas that general aviation pilots continue to suffer from—and that cause accidents.

The video has garnered significant—and positive—response from pilots and instructors at all levels. The scene is set in the Atlanta Hartsfield International Airport, as Thorne deplanes and is greeted by Gryder. As Thorne relates, “I like to capture that raw thing, and set up the story in the right way.” So, he had no pre-briefing from Gryder on how their time together would unfold. What viewers see on the video are Thorne’s honest reactions to the situations into which Gryder places him.

Their first task is to question random airline pilots at the airport on a seemingly simple question: Is maneuvering speed a maximum or a minimum? Airline pilots say minimum, and it’s a speed they have calculated in advance of each flight based on conditions, but general aviation pilots quizzed later have routinely been taught V_A as a maximum—and they tend to spout out one number with only a minor adjustment for weight.

After that question follows a second one. Which is more important: a strong stall recovery or the prevention of a low-speed scenario? Again, the airline pilots queried answer in favor of prevention, while GA pilots responded in favor of stall recovery. Gryder believes this thinking forms the foundation for what hurts us time and again in light airplanes.

Gryder has contemplated the whys of fatal stall-spin accidents ever since two specific tragedies hit him close to home. The first: A student of his, Brock, experienced an engine failure on takeoff at 300 feet agl in a Cessna 172, followed by a stall and spin. Then, just a year later, in a Kitfox, at the same airport, under the same conditions, his colleague Leo did the same thing.

“Brock wasn’t trained—it was my fault,” says Gryder. “Our entire system out there needs new concepts, new review.”

“This is definitely a conversation we all need to have,” says Thorne.

Thorne’s flight review focused on the following: Loss of power on takeoff. Defined minimum maneuvering speed. Inadvertent IMC. Go-arounds. The video captures the full effect of the lessons involved, but they boil down into a few key takeaways.

Loss of power on takeoff. Mitigating the accident that follows means changing your expectations. So, step one is to talk to yourself and be expecting it: “There’s the engine failure. Push.” When you hear the pitch change in the engine, push the nose forward, and unload the wing. As demonstrated in the video, within six seconds the airplane approaches a stall in the Piper Cherokee used in the flight review, if the wing isn’t unloaded. “If you’re totally not expecting it, your 286 computer stops computing,” says Gryder.

DMMS: Defined minimum maneuvering speed. This is similar to the speed that airline pilots polled in the video are referencing when they talk about maneuvering speed being a minimum, not a maximum. Gryder calculates the number as 1.404 times V_S, to account for a margin above stall speed in up to a 30-degree bank. It comes out to 68 knots in the Cherokee, so Thorne puts a homemade indicator made of colored tape on his airspeed indicator. Below this speed, there be dragons—any flight in this regime should raise an instant red flag unless purposefully made.

Inadvertent IMC. In the video, this takes the form of a demonstration on task management, on how not to get overloaded during a takeoff into IMC that occurs before the pilot is truly ready. Stress is added by emulating an annoyed controller with an inept pilot. To increase the stress, Gryder hands Thorne an after-takeoff checklist—with the instruction to complete it before he can contact the controller after departure. The idea is to imprint the old adage with a new version: “aviate, navigate—and manage the airplane—and then communicate.” “Your number-one job is to fly the airplane,” says Gryder.

Go-arounds. If you pull up during a go-around without regaining all of your power, you put yourself in a bad situation. During a go-around, both hands are going to push—the one that’s on the yoke and the one that’s on the power quadrant. Gain speed, gain power back (using throttle and carb heat, if installed), and then begin the climb. Get your energy going before you retract the flaps.

Thorne’s flight review ends with a trip over to the airport where Brock and Leo died, with almost the same weather and runway conditions that they had on that day—good VFR. Gryder pulled the power on Thorne after takeoff, he pushed, and they saw what was ahead: a survivable landing, if you stayed under control.

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For his first video of 2018, Flight Chops (AKA Steve Thorne) is conducting a sort of victory lap for what he says is probably his best accomplishment of 2017. The feat? “Actually starting and finishing something.” We all know how good that can feel. More specifically, he earned his multi engine rating, and now his followers can tag along in the latest episode.

As he explains on his blog, this was the first actual flight test that Chops has done in over 15 years, and so he experienced some butterflies. “It was amazing how visceral that pre-check ride stress feeling was leading up to the test – it felt just like my first private pilot checkride,” he said.

Check out the first part of his multi engine rating adventure above, and part two here:

A new year means a new Flight Chops contest, and January’s prize is truly cool (and a Flying subscription makes it even cooler, obviously). Chops is looking for a “fascinating aviation story” that will get its own episode, so hopefully your best tale has the right stuff.

The post Flight Chops: Do the Pre-Check Ride Butterflies Ever Go Away? appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

As Steve Thorne told us recently, out of all the aircraft he has already flown and would love to fly, no plane comes close to a Spitfire for him. That one is clearly at the top of his “bucket list.” Still, that doesn’t mean there aren’t more aircraft on his list, and as a result of his U.S. Coast Guard rescue training, he was able to cross one special airplane off his list. In this week’s Flight Chops throwback, he enjoys his first flight in an L-39 to pull some G’s and “play in these clouds,” and it’s definitely something we can all be jealous of.

As always, check out the latest Flight Chops giveaway, which includes a subscription to Flying.

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For this Throwback Thursday edition of Flight Chops, we’re going back to 2016 for a really cool example of how being an aviation YouTube celebrity leads to some pretty awesome adventures. Or, in this case, how two aviation YouTube celebrities received the opportunity to undergo U.S. Coast Guard training because they have some fans in high places.

Flight Chops teamed up with “steveo1kinevo” after their fan, LCDR Charlie Wilson, reached out to offer them a helicopter flight. Instead, the pilots chose to get a taste of “Scary, Rewarding, Exciting and Exhausting” rescue training, which for Chops included the very intimidating SWET chair. Steveo wasn’t as keen to live a “day in the life of a Coastie,” and so he passed on being flipped upside-down under water.

As an added bonus, Chops even went through the experience of being rescued by the Coast Guard.

As always, check out the latest Flight Chops giveaway. This month’s contest features an awesome gift pack from Flying Contributor Jason Miller of the The Finer Points of Flying, as well as other goodies, including a subscription to Flying.

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For this week’s Flight Chops throwback, we’re sharing a particularly funny video from 2014 about “the good, the bad and the barfing” of flying with passengers. As everyone’s favorite weekend warrior pilot Steve Thorne explained, “This video is really just about sharing experiences, both mine and some of my friends, kind of starting the conversation about passenger management as a private pilot.” But the fun part involves him breaking down different “passenger character types.”

The results are expectedly hilarious, and possibly very familiar to most pilots. If anything, we probably all know a Cousin Jen.

As always, check out the latest Flight Chops giveaway, which includes, among other awesome things, a subscription to Flying.

The post Flight Chops: The Highs and Lows of Flying with Passengers appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

This week’s throwback Thursday edition of Flight Chops begins with a simple question: Could you survive with nothing but the kit in your airplane? “It’s the responsibility of the pilot in command to keep their aircraft and passengers safe,” Steve Thorne, AKA Flight Chops, explains in the opening of this video from earlier in the year. “That includes dealing with a forced landing that could leave you stranded.”

And because he’s the best at throwing himself into any situation for the sake of a learning experience, Chops attended a Survival Shakedown course to answer the question himself. As he pointed out, there was plenty of blood, sweat and tears, and there was especially enough educational content to produce two parts:

For more on Survival Shakedown, check out the website. As always, be sure to enter the latest Flight Chops giveaway, which includes a subscription to Flying and other awesome prizes.

The post Flight Chops: Survive a Forced Landing in the Winter Wilderness appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

Part of what makes Flight Chops videos so successful (and entertaining) is that Steve Thorne gets to fly the planes most of us don’t have the opportunity to fly, and he gets test gear that we don’t necessarily get to use. For his latest episode, Chops and friends tested one piece of equipment that we don’t ever want to use, as he took a “refreshing dip” in brisk waters to try out a Winslow LifeRaft.

“Most of us have never deployed a life raft,” explains Jason Miller of The Finer Points and Flying, “so we actually took the opportunity to get in the water, pop the life raft, see if we can get in it, see if we can flip it — see how that really works. The idea is you’ve seen a little bit of it, you’ve prepared, you’re kind of ahead of the game so that you feel confident when you come up here and do this kind of stuff with your family.”

Of course, it helps to know that the actual life raft comes with more supplies than just a bag full of bubble wrap.

As always, be sure to enter the latest Flight Chops giveaway, which includes a subscription to Flying and other awesome prizes.

The post Flight Chops: What it’s Like to Actually Deploy a Life Raft appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

“My friend MJ is deathly afraid of flying,” Steve Thorne explains in the opening of one of his more popular Flight Chops videos. He’s not embellishing her fear at all, as MJ becomes the ultimate pessimistic passenger the moment she simply sits in a cockpit to get a feel for the airplane. “That’s scary because it’s so close to my face,” she says of the instrument panel, “If we crash it’s like, forget my nose, forget my teeth.”

“What if we’re in the air and there’s a tornado,” she asks to the delight of her friends, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. In today’s throwback Flight Chops video, we get to watch as MJ faces her greatest fear, all while Thorne, in the unique role of pilot-therapist, tries to keep her cool, calm and collect. (Be warned that MJ’s fear comes with some colorful language.)

As he mentions in the video, Thorne felt like a bit of an idiot for a “minor screw up” at the end, and you can watch his analysis of the wake turbulence here. And while MJ was exhausted by the “therapy,” it worked well enough that she later took a flying lesson.

As always, enter the latest Flight Chops giveaway, which features the Bose Aviation A20 headset, as well as a subscription to Flying.

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At a time when we wonder if millennials have any interest in aviation, and especially if they can afford it (for more, read “On Course” from the November issue of Flying), Matt Guthmiller’s story is one every pilot can appreciate. Flying since he was 16, Guthmiller added his name to the record books when he flew a 1981 A36 Beechcraft Bonanza around the world by himself at age 19, and he now shares his flying adventures with more than 36,000 people on YouTube.

As such, he’s the perfect guest star for the latest episode of Flight Chops. Heck, based on Guthmiller’s résumé, you could probably call Steve Thorne the guest star, but it’s a good thing for us that these two adventurers and YouTube personalities hit the sky together, because watching them deal with autopilot failure makes for an entertaining lesson.

As always, sign up for the latest Flight Chops giveaway, which includes a subscription to Flying.

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