Gargantua

It started at a restaurant.

Quentin and I had been turning the same idea over for a while: what if studying for the ATPL was actually accessible? Not a mountain of dense textbooks and expensive courses, but something closer to opening Duolingo on the metro. Simple. Daily. Something you'd actually want to come back to.

That was the original idea. An app for the ATPL.

But the more we talked, the more we researched, the more the scope started to shift. Why stop at the ATPL? Aviation is a closed world, and the learning tools haven't really moved in decades — and that's true for every domain, not just the airline track. Pilots, students, enthusiasts, people just curious about how a plane stays in the air. There was a gap everywhere we looked.

So the project grew.

From "an app for the ATPL" to "an app for all of aviation" — from beginner basics to advanced material.

That's when we called it Gargantua. Because at that point, it really was huge. Almost too huge. And there was nothing comparable in the space, which made it both exciting and a little terrifying.

Splitting the work

Quentin took on the research side. He talked to a lot of pilots, students, instructors — basically anyone willing to share what they actually needed and what they wished existed. That work shaped a lot of what came next.

On my side, I started building the first technical demo: a duel system. Two players, one aviation topic, a series of QCM questions, fastest correct answers wins. The stack was basic — it could handle around 50 concurrent users, no more. But it worked.

The first test

We put it in front of 20 testers. They got into it. They wanted to play again.

That was the moment Gargantua stopped being just an idea.