How First Flight Got Here

First Flight was named in part to honor the two most famous bike mechanics of all time, Wilbur and Orville Wright. It also honors our founder, Jeff Archer, an Ohio native who, like the Wright Brothers, came down to North Carolina to do his best work. We love Ohio, but the state has produced more astronauts per capita than any other state for a reason. 

Jeff's version of leaving Ohio started with a pile of bike parts. A dad in his Boy Scout troop handed him the parts one afternoon in 1979. Jeff was in high school. Not sure what else to do with all that metal, he started building bikes out of it, one after another, until half the kids in the neighborhood were bringing him their bikes to fix too.

That's the whole origin. No business plan, no market research, just a teenager who liked taking bikes apart and putting them back together better because it's cool and fun.

In college at Ohio State, he was working a shop job near campus and bought his first mountain bike, a Raleigh Seneca. He graduated with a computer engineering degree in 1987 and never used it; bikes are more fun. Instead, he and some friends spent a week driving through the Carolinas and Georgia, stopping into every bike shop they passed, just looking. Charlotte seemed like a city nobody had figured out yet. So he moved.

He landed at Cool Breeze Cyclery in Mooresville, working for a guy named Bruce. Two years later, he was Bruce's equal partner, and they opened a second store in Statesville. It outgrew its space almost immediately. Then outgrew the next one too.

In 1994, Jeff and Bruce split the business. Jeff kept Statesville and Hickory, and that's when First Flight Bicycles became official. A year later, the Statesville store moved into 216 S. Center St., two full stories, because Jeff already had more bikes than one floor could hold.

We're still in that building.

Around 2005, people kept calling in asking to upgrade old mountain bikes and running into parts that didn't fit anymore. So Jeff and some friends from the Crossroads Festival, which was a vintage bike swap meet by then, decided to just build the frames themselves. First Flight bought the Mountain Goat brand from founder Jeff Lindsay and started making old-school steel that would take modern components. That same festival brought people like Ross Shafer and Jacquie Phelan and Joe Murray through Statesville, names that show up in actual mountain bike history books.

The awards came later. Bicycling magazine put us in their Top 100 shops in 2011. We were just doing what we'd always done, and some folks noticed.

Jeff was killed on July 20, 2016, crossing a street in Mooresville.

He was elected to the Mountain Bike Hall of Fame after he died.

Wesley Davidson had been on staff since 1997. In 2017 he became the owner. Nothing about the shop really changed hands, since Wes had already spent half his life behind that counter. He just kept it running.

We knocked down some walls in 2019 and put in beer taps, because a good ride should end with a beer. We stayed open through 2020, parts shortages and all. We hit 35 years in 2024.

We're still here doing what Jeff was doing in 1979: fixing whatever's in front of us.