About
A pilot who builds digital businesses.
Pylon8 exists because most aviation businesses are stuck with a digital presence that doesn't reflect the quality of what they actually do.
I'm Nathan Van Kempen— a professional certified flight instructor and a professional software engineer, based in Honolulu. Two full careers, not a hobby in either direction. I know your business because I've lived it on the flight line, and I know how to build the system around it because I've shipped production software for a living.
Most agencies spread the work across four people — an account manager who takes the brief, a designer who has never seen a preflight, a developer who translates the design, and a marketer who writes copy using keywords pulled from a tool. Every handoff loses information. Every markup inflates the price.
Pylon8 is structured the opposite way. It's a founder-led studio — the person who takes your first call is the person who designs your site, writes your content, builds your campaigns, and wires your systems. When a project calls for it, I bring in named production partners for photo, video, or brand work — never anonymous subcontractors, never work you haven't approved.
Under the hood (for the technically curious)
Every site is hand-built on Next.js with TypeScript and React. No WordPress, no page builders, no template bloat. Deployed on managed edge infrastructure for auto-scaling, global delivery, and near-instant page loads.
SEO is structured end-to-end: LocalBusiness, Course, FAQ, Article, and Service schema where relevant, sitemap automation, and clean semantic markup. Analytics wired through GA4 and Google Search Console, with event tracking tuned to the conversions that actually matter.
Lead capture forms validate server-side, route to email and CRM simultaneously, and are rate-limited for spam protection without CAPTCHA friction.
- Credentials
- Certified Flight Instructor (CFI)
Professional software engineer
B.A. Computer Science — Data Science & A.I., University of San Diego - Based in
- Honolulu, Hawaii
- Personal site
- nathanv.dev
- Focus
- Websites, growth, creative, and systems for aviation businesses
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