Noel Philips

Noel Philips is a traveller, trip reporter, and a popular YouTuber.

He has 460K subscribers on his eponymous YouTube channel and 1.6M followers on his Facebook page.

Noel is also a private pilot.

Introduction-

Noel Philip John was born on 29 December 1980 in Leicester, England, United Kingdom.

He grew up in Leicester.

Love for aviation-

In 1992, at 11, Noel took part in an exchange visit conducted by his school to visit a school in Moscow, Russia.

At that time, he was not interested in going to Russia but rather was interested in flying on an airplane as he had never flown before.

Noel implored his parents to save up the money for his flight and thanks to this trip, he fell in love with aviation.

He flew to Moscow on a brand-new BA 767 and while flying, he visited the flight deck and interacted with the pilots and upon landing in Moscow, he saw a variety of planes, and this cemented his love for aviation.

Unfortunately, Noel was not able to fly again for a period of eight years as his parents were not able to afford it.

At that time, he and his family were living on a council estate in Leicester and were not rich and were not able to go on foreign holidays.

So, Noel maintained his love for aviation by reading airplane magazines and books.

Later, he used to visit Birmingham Airport and used to get excited by seeing less popular airlines like Turkmenistan Airlines, Uzbekistan Airways.

Even though Noel did not know about Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, he desired to fly on their airlines and experience them.

Career-

From February 2000 to June 2002, Noel worked as a Research Officer at Avsoft in Rugby, England.

Here, his job involved travelling to airports, plane spotting and enquiring various airlines about their fleet.

Noel loved plane spotting dearly.

His job also involved logging every detail of his flights which included photographing and writing notes.

Then, from September 2003 to December 2006, Noel worked as a Technical Support Engineer for Zibrant.

From December 2006 to July 2012, he worked as a Pre/Post Sales Technical Engineer for Arrow ECS United Kingdom.

From July 2012 to September 2013, Noel worked as a Senior ICT Infrastructure & Systems Engineer for East Midlands Ambulance Service.

From September 2013 to March 2015, he worked as a Systems Administrator/Analyst at Source BioScience.

Then, from March 2015 to October 2017, Noel worked as a Technical Consultant/Systems Architect for Stoneseed Ltd.

From October 2017 to March 2019, he worked as a Security Consultant for Exclusive Networks Limited UK.

Blogging & YouTubing-

Noel used to blog at the Trip Reports forum of the Airliners.net website and used to share his trip reports with a lot of photos of his flights.

In 2009, he observed youngsters YouTubing and so, on 9 December 2009, he started his YouTube channel, ‘InflightVideo,’ he later renamed this channel after himself.

As his IT job involved travelling, Noel used to film his flights and post it onto his channel.

At that time, he was not serious about YouTube and wanted to just use it as a repository to store his videos for watching later.

One day Noel logged into his YouTube channel and saw that he gained a couple of thousand subscribers and this inspired him to continue working on his YouTube channel.

Around 2012, he progressed to publishing trip reports on his channel and later, started publishing full-length flight videos but as this content seemed repetitive, on 1 January 2018, he reverted to publishing only trip reports on his channel.

Becoming successful, thanks to the world’s second-longest flight-

In 2018, over his holiday weekend, Noel flew direct from London to Perth in a Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner of Qantas.

As at that time, he was working in a full-time job, he quickly wanted to return to London after landing in Australia to not miss his work.

So, Noel flew to Auckland, New Zealand in order to fly from Auckland to Doha on a Boeing 777-200LR of Qatar Airways.

This was the world’s second-longest flight at the time and the flight was around eighteen hours.

On 4 May 2018, Noel published a video titled ‘71 HOURS IN ECONOMY! Flying on the World’s Longest Flights Back to Back!’.

This video became viral and launched his YouTube channel.

And a year later, in March 2019, at 38, Noel quit his high paying IT Consultant job to become a full-time YouTuber.

A successful YouTuber-

As of December 2023, Noel has 460K subscribers on his eponymous YouTube channel, 1.6M followers on his Facebook page, and 65.3K followers on Instagram.

Noel earns from a variety of sources like advertisements, Membership and ‘Super Thanks’ on his YouTube channel, affiliate marketing, selling merchandise, sponsorships, and he also accepts donations on Patreon.

He has an eponymous website.

Most of the time, Noel pays for his own flights as he believes that accepting free flights from airlines incapacitates his ability to provide honest reviews.

He gets business class tickets at affordable prices thanks to miles and upgrades.

Noel owns ‘IFV Media Limited’ in the United Kingdom and an LLC in the United States for managing his video content business.

He has a team helping him out with his YouTube channel.

Noel uses a GoPro HERO9 camera.

A pilot-

Noel got his Private Pilot License (PPL) in 2002 but was not able to fly for twenty years as he could not afford it.

But during COVID-19, he regained his license back and started flying.

Noel holds an Instrument Rating (Restricted).

As flying aircraft is his hobby, he started his second channel, ‘Fly With Noel Philips‘.

Noel flies Piper PA-28 Cherokee around Texas.

Trains & buses-

In addition to flying, Noel also travels by trains and buses.

As he lived near a railway line, he used to watch trains pass by constantly and got desensitized towards trains.

Once Noel got fascinated by sleeper trains and travelled in a Caledonian Sleeper Train and as he loved the train travel and as the YouTube audience loved watching it, he started travelling in trains more frequently.

He also occasionally travels by buses and publishes those videos onto his channel.

Personal life-

Noel is married to Rachel.

This couple has a son, Sam and a daughter, Anna.

Rachel helps him in running his business.

Noel’s mother helps him with the transportation of his merchandise and deals with his Patreons and his father supervises his finances.

He is tall at 6’4”.

In 2022, Noel and his family moved from Mansfield, England to Houston, Texas, United States.

Some interesting facts about Noel-

Nepal is his favourite country.
Noel is friends with Josh Cahill, a popular aviation YouTuber and they collaborated in a few of Noel’s videos.
Thanks to his passion for IT, he loves coding and building web applications.
Noel loves flying in Emirates A380 First Class and Rockwell B-1 Lancer is his favourite fighter jet.

So, how are you inspired by the success story of Noel Philips?

Share with me in the comment section below.