Last year I was in the ICU and thought my flying career was over. So I built something to help others facing the same situation
A little over a year and a half ago, my life changed pretty drastically. This week, I launched my first SaaS.
I’m 27 years old and an airline pilot.
In February 2025, I ended up in the ICU with diabetic ketoacidosis and was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes. My blood sugar at the time was in the 700s. They told me I was in the verge of slipping into a coma. Prior to this I have always been an active, fit, and healthy person.
For anyone unfamiliar with aviation, pilots have to maintain an FAA medical certificate to fly. Certain medical conditions, including insulin-treated diabetes, require a lengthy review and special authorization from the FAA.
So, almost overnight, I went from flying airplanes for a living to being grounded.
I spent the next 11 months trying to get my medical certification back. It involved countless doctor’s appointments, medical records, paperwork, and trying to understand exactly what the FAA needed from me.
It was honestly one of the most stressful periods of my life. I had worked incredibly hard to become an airline pilot, and suddenly my entire career was uncertain.
Fortunately, I eventually received my special issuance medical certificate and returned to flying.
But the experience left me thinking about how unnecessarily complicated the entire process was.
There was no single place where I could easily organize my medical appointments, track important dates, keep my documents together, or understand the FAA’s published requirements for different medical conditions. And it wasn’t just people with diabetes. Thousands of pilots deal with medical certification requirements, whether it’s sleep apnea, high blood pressure, ADHD, heart conditions, or simply keeping up with their regular medical renewals.
That’s where the idea for Crosscheck came from.
I’m not a professional software developer. I’m an airline pilot who started experimenting with AI-assisted coding and gradually realized I could actually build something useful.
What started as an idea turned into months of learning, building, breaking things, fixing them, and spending way too many late nights working on a project I wasn’t even sure anyone would use.
The result is Crosscheck, a web-based platform designed to help pilots manage their FAA medical certification.
It includes:
-A free FAA medication lookup tool.
-A search function of every FAA doctor (Aviation medical examiner) in the country where you can leave reviews and pricing information for the next person in a map/list view
-A free database of FAA medical conditions and published certification guidance.
-Medical certificate tracking and expiration reminders.
-A place to organize doctor visits, medications, and medical documents.
-A MedXPress helper to make preparing for renewals easier.
-A Certification Assistant to help pilots organize the requirements associated with their medical conditions.
The medication and condition lookup tools are completely free and don’t even require an account. The organizational features have free and paid tiers.
The goal isn’t to replace doctors, Aviation Medical Examiners, or the FAA. It’s simply to make an unnecessarily confusing process easier to navigate. A lot of the FAA guidance on a specific condition is spread across multiple pages. For example type 1 diabetes has about 7 different pdfs across multiple pages. The goal here was to simplify that. Overall the website monitors over 300 FAA documents on a weekly/ monthly basis looking for updates on specific conditions, medications etc.
I officially launched Crosscheck this week.
I have no idea whether it’ll become a successful business. It’s an extremely niche market, and I’m learning the business side of SaaS as I go.
But there’s something pretty surreal about looking back at where I was last year, wondering whether I’d ever fly again, and realizing that experience ultimately pushed me to build something of my own. I’m still flying full-time, and this has become my passion project outside the cockpit.
Now comes the part I’m probably least experienced with: getting people to actually discover and use it.
For those of you who’ve launched niche SaaS products, especially without a traditional software development background, I’d love to hear how you approached finding your first users. Did you focus on SEO, communities, partnerships, or something else entirely?
And if anyone wants to check out what I’ve built, it’s CrossCheckMed.com.
Appreciate any feedback, especially from those who’ve been through the early stages of launching their first SaaS.