If you know me outside of this website, you know that this isn’t my day job. After three years of studying Aviation Management in college, I currently work at a small international airport in northern Ohio. “How does this relate to NASCAR”, you may be wondering? That’s because of our hangar neighbors, ThorSport Racing.
ThorAir is used by the team owners, members, and drivers to travel all over the country at a moment’s notice. I sat down with team pilots Hunter McDonald and Chase Volz to find out what it’s like to work in one of the lesser known behind-the-scenes aspects of a race team’s operations.
Much like myself, neither knew growing up that they wanted to be pilots. Hunter describes how he took an aptitude test in his junior year of high school and one of the outcomes told him he could be a pilot.
“I wrote a paper on [the profession] and decided it was pretty cool. I decided to try it out and went to Bowling Green State University for their four-year [aviation] program,” he told me.
He worked at the university as an instructor for two months before he was offered a job at Griffing Flying Service in Port Clinton, Ohio. There, he worked as an island and charter pilot for over two years before moving on to ThorAir around eight years ago.
For Chase, it was a similar story of sort of falling into the profession.
“I had never thought about flying airplanes in college,” he told me. “I was a member of the skydiving club at Ohio State where I would jump out of airplanes, not fly them.”
After college, he took that small bit of aviation knowledge and got a job on the ground crew for the MetLife blimp. While travelling around the country with the blimp, he took a discovery flight and decided to start working towards his pilot’s license.
“It was too hard to advance in different spots and with different instructors,” he described. “So I left there and went to ATP Flight School in Richmond, Virginia and knocked out my private, instrument, commercial, multi-engine, and instructor ratings.”
After that, he switched roles when it came to skydiving and flew the divers and cargo in Cessna 182s and Caravans. He then moved up to flying medical Cessna Citation jets out of Burke Lakefront Airport in Cleveland, Ohio for the next six years. After flying charter jets for the next two years, he took all of that experience from various aviation jobs and landed at ThorAir in July of 2023.
Unlike airline flying, Hunter and Chase don’t have a set schedule. Whenever and wherever their passengers need to go, they take them.
“If we happen to go to a race, we’re either taking ownership or sometimes the drivers and crew to the track. A lot of times it’s there and back in the same day. Sometimes we’ll spend the night at a race, but for the most part we’re getting there, watching the race, and heading back as soon as the race is over.” Hunter told me.
After attending multiple truck races a year for eight years, he frequently just watches them on TV these days and gets the plane ready before his passengers are ready to go.
It was a busier year for the two in 2023 as ThorSport driver Ben Rhodes won the Truck Series Championship.
“We flew him to a few media events, down to Charlotte a few times, and some others to the awards banquet,” Hunter said.
The 2023 Championship race at Phoenix was the first race Chase had been to.
“Don’t get used to this,” Hunter laughed, “It’s not like this every year.”
They don’t have the opportunity to go to every race, but they’ll attend the bigger events like Daytona, Atlanta, and the Playoff races assuming the team is racing for a Championship.
When it comes to non-flying days, their schedule looks a bit different.
“You don’t really know your schedule, but you’re not on the road as much as you would be flying for the airlines,” Hunter said “We’re gone maybe two, three nights a month.”
He added that their non-flying days include things like invoicing, gathering credit card receipts for trip expenses, and waiting to see if they’re going to be flying. As long as they’re not on vacation, their schedules are always open if anyone would need to fly.
When it comes to NASCAR itself, neither pilot had been a fan before they started flying for the team.
“I hadn’t watched a single race before I started this job,” Hunter told me, “I was not a NASCAR fan at all. But it’s different knowing the drivers. Knowing the people has definitely made me a NASCAR fan. I always thought NASCAR was just a bunch of people driving left until I realized how many people are employed in a team just to get a couple hundredths of a second in a lap time.”
“It’s cool seeing the stuff that team’s try to do to shave off barely any time,” Chase added. “I still don’t really watch it. I follow the Truck Series but I don’t watch [the Cup Series] at all. If it’s on, I’ll watch it and be like, ‘Oh those are our four guys!’. A lot of the behind the scenes stuff is really cool.”
“The biggest thing I’ve learned is just how calculated everything is,” Hunter said. “It’s all so complicated, there’s more to it than just taking a car and going as fast as you can and a lot of people don’t realize that.”
Whether an aviation junkie is learning about NASCAR for the first time, or a NASCAR fan is learning how airplanes fly, it’s clear to see how important aviation is to the sport. People like Hunter and Chase make it possible for team members, drivers, and crew to be at the track every week.
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