Father's Day Gifts for Pilot Dads (From an Actual Fighter Pilot)

Some links below are affiliate links — if you buy through them, I earn a small commission at no cost to you. It keeps The Flyby flying.

Every June, the same tragedy unfolds across America. A well-meaning family member googles "gifts for pilot dad," and three days later, a man who flies airplanes for a living unwraps a mug that says World's Best Pilot with a clipart Cessna on it.

He will smile. He will say thank you. He will use it to hold pens.

I fly the F/A-18 for the Navy, which means I am both a pilot and have a jet-curious Dad, so consider this insider intel. Here's what the pilot dad in your life actually wants—whether he flies fighters, flew freight, or just pauses the grill every time something loud goes overhead.

The F-35 "Strava Stat Card" Tee

Full disclosure: I made this one. But it's still an awesome F-35 performance stat shirt (Mach 1.6, 50,000 ft, 1,200 nm) laid out like a Strava activity card on the back of a Comfort Colors tee. Somewhere out there is a dad who runs a 5K, checks his splits, and then watches F-35 videos on the couch. This shirt was engineered in a lab for that man.

And if the F-35 isn't his jet, the rest of the Will Paige Designs hangar has him covered, including a Felix the Cat F-14 for the Tomcat loyalists who still haven't emotionally recovered from its retirement. (We know. We're sad, too.)

Skunk Works by Ben Rich

If he reads exactly one aviation book in his life, it's this one. The inside story of Lockheed's secret division: the SR-71, the F-117, and a group of engineers who kept building the impossible on government deadlines. Aviation nerds love this one.

A Real Flight Sim Stick and Throttle

Modern flight sims are legitimately impressive, but flying one with a keyboard is like golfing with a rake. A HOTAS setup (hands on throttle and stick — yes, we have an acronym for everything) is the difference between "playing a video game" and "where did my Saturday go?"

I'll say this from experience: the muscle memory transfer is real. For the dad who dreamed about flying jets, this is the closest seat to the real thing that doesn't require a flight surgeon's signature.

A Model of His Airplane

The key word is his. The jet he flew. The airliner he captained. The Cessna from his first solo. A random airplane is a dust collector, the right airplane is a story he gets to tell every single person who walks into his office. Forever. You've been warned (again).

Emergency Squawk Mug

This might be cheesy but as a certified Dad-joke connoisseur, this lame mug I said not to get actually makes me chuckle. Try it out, for $15, worst case he throws it at you!

WHOOP

I've written about flying with WHOOP and my longer-term 3-month review, but the short version: sleep and recovery data is the most useful performance tool I use outside the jet. For the data-driven dad, this turns his health into a dashboard he will check obsessively. Pairs dangerously well with gift #1.

And if you're not a dad but you have a dad bod, try a free WHOOP and one month free when you join with my link: https://join.whoop.com/4F98EF17

A Garmin D2 Mach 2

If he can't go Mach 2, he might as well wear one. I fly (and ride, and run) with a Garmin Fenix, and the D2 Mach 2 is essentially the Fenix's cousin who went to flight school and won't shut up about it, in the best way. It's everything Garmin does well: sleep, recovery, training, 26-day battery, plus a full aviation suite: moving map with airspace boundaries, METARs on the watch face that change color with the weather, and alerts when conditions bust his personal minimums.

This is the splurge gift. It's also the only thing on this list dad will wear in the cockpit, at the gym, and to your wedding.

Ask Him About His Flying

No link. No shipping deadline. If your dad flew, whether military, airline, weekend warrior, doesn't matter. Ask him about his first solo. Ask about the time he scared himself. Pilots are sitting on decades of stories and most of us are just waiting for someone to ask.

This one beats everything else on the list, and that's including the shirt I designed.

Honorable Mentions: aviation sunglasses he'll lose in a month, a hangar fridge, Zyn, a grandkid named after his callsign.

Happy Father's Day to the pilot dads and to the dads who raised pilots. 🫡

— Will