Why We Fly

A few years ago, you had a heart valve replacement; a few months ago, your wife passed away and you retired. What to do? If you’re Jim Hazen, you learn to fly—and then you get out and go somewhere.

“I didn’t know what to do with myself,” Hazen says. “But I always wanted to go places.” Hazen, who lives in the Phoenix area, decided that applying for a medical certificate wasn’t in his best interest given the valve replacement, so he pursued a sport pilot certificate instead. And he was hooked in no time. “Once I soloed, the only thing that was going to stop me was death,” Hazen jokes. After what he calls an anticlimactic checkride, he bought an Allegro light sport aircraft, and took off for the road.

At first, he simply used the Allegro like any other aircraft owner would. He went to visit his son in Texas, his brother in Southern California, and family in the Pacific Northwest. A few months into his travels he counted and realized he had flown in 14 states. When he proudly mentioned that to a friend, a challenge came back. “Well, that’s less than a third,” the friend said. And so Hazen kept traveling. He flew commercially to North Carolina and then ferried an Allegro back west, which knocked a few more states off his list. But he realized if he was going to make it to all 48 contiguous states, he was going to need to travel just for the sake of traveling.

“I always thought I had to have a reason to go somewhere,” Hazen says. And as someone who once traveled for a living, that was an understandable position. But Hazen realized he could travel just for the experience.

To keep his trips safe and interesting, Hazen said he looked at bad weather as an opportunity to go to a new place and meet new people. He sought out night training and instrument training, neither of which is required to obtain a sport pilot certificate. And Hazen said if there was “more than a two-and-a-half percent chance of a storm, I didn’t fly.”

The long trips took Hazen through every part of this beautiful country, but the scenery isn’t what interested him most. “The best thing about it was the people,” he says. “If it wasn’t for the people, it wouldn’t have been worth it.” And he means it. Hazen can rattle off the names of airport managers, FBO attendants, refuelers, and other pilots he met across the country.

Instead of describing the beauty of the mountains or the desert, Hazen speaks fondly of the couches, chairs, and other places he slept along the way. And then there are the airport pets, which could fill their own book. The biggest dog, Hazen says, was in Eufala, Alabama, and the fattest cat was in Wyoming.

Traveling by light airplane across the country gave Hazen a new appreciation for American life. Aviation is “America the way it used to be,” he says. “People watch out for each other.” If the many people along the way who gave Hazen a place to sleep, keys to a car, or helped him refuel are any indication, he’s spot on.

After landing in 48 states at the controls of an airplane some may not consider to be good for anything beyond the traffic pattern, what’s Hazen’s only regret? Waiting to learn to fly. “Don’t wait 40 years like I did,” he says.