Pankey is a former US Air Force pilot who grew up in Louisiana. After 20 years with the Air Force, he retired as a Lieutenant Colonel in 2016 and got a job with Southwest Airlines as a commercial pilot, where he’s been for the past seven years.
He’s no stranger to van life, having lived in one when he first started at the company.
“When I first got hired at the airline, I bought a little lot of land in a town called Crested Butte in Colorado,” Pankey told Insider. The idea was to build a hangar-style home, buy an airplane, and fly to work, he said.
But in the meantime, he was living in an apartment complex next to his lot and commuting to airports in Denver and Los Angeles whenever he was scheduled for a flight.
“I’d stay at hotels before I actually went to work. I had to pay out of pocket and I was spending like $800 a month,” he said. “So I thought, what if I bought a van and renovated it?”
He kept the van in the airport parking lots and ended up sleeping in it to save hotel money whenever he went to work, he added. This became his arrangement for the next couple of years.
“When I finally got that thing completely sprayed, it was just a huge load off my shoulders,” Pankey said.
The insulation wasn’t just keeping the inside of the truck warm, it was good for soundproofing too, he said: “It was so quiet in there. Even if I was running a power tool on the inside, you couldn’t hear anything from the outside.”
“One of my neighbors used to bring over his amp and his guitar, and he would sing in it. It was really loud before the foam, and after you couldn’t even hear it at all,” he added.
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