Learning to fly: Hazen senior earns private pilot license

Published 1:30 pm Thursday, May 14, 2026

Getting up to 14,000 feet in the air may be daunting for most, but for Trevor Sooy, it’s just another day in his senior year.

Sooy, who goes to Hazen High School, recently earned his private pilot license, an endeavor that started when he was 17.

“We started college visits about a year ago and I knew I wanted to go into aviation, to become a pilot, and a lot of the schools said to start working toward my private pilot license. So shortly after visiting these colleges, I enrolled in flight school, where I spent about a year working toward earning my license,” said Sooy. “That consisted of flying with an instructor, making sure I had all my required hours and then also a lot of studying because not only are you learning to fly, you’re also learning all the regulations, the aerodynamics, like the physics behind it and kind of everything that comes with flying.”

Though Sooy had been interested in aviation since he was a young kid, he says that during COVID lockdowns, he was watching a lot of YouTube videos and came across a lot of videos of pilots and airplanes in general.

“We are not an aviation family at all,” said Trina Sooy, his mother. “We all like flying, like traveling, but to navigate the how-to? Trevor and I did a lot of research and talking to people and one of the things that we discovered was that there’s not one path that a pilot can take.”

Sooy enrolled in the Rainier Flight Service at the Auburn Municipal Airport and said that, when the weather was good, he was up in the air close to five days a week. Now that he has his license, the next step is graduating from Hazen High School and enrolling at Arizona State University, where Sooy plans to pursue a bachelor of science in aeronautical management technology, saying that he wants to become a commercial pilot.

“My goal and dream would to probably be a pilot for Delta, flying international flights,” said Sooy.

As far as achieving his goal of getting his private pilot license, Sooy said he was surprised by how much more there is to just learning to fly.

“A lot of people think flight school, you’re just jumping in a plane, just learning to fly. But there’s so much more behind the scenes stuff that a lot of people don’t really realize,” he said.

“All the studying that you have to do, you’re basically learning to fly, but you’re also learning how to become a mechanic because you need to know all about your engine, you need to learn kind of how to be a meteorologist, you’re kind of becoming a lawyer making sure that you know all of the rules and regulations that you need to follow. You need to kind learn a little bit like a doctor does, like how pressure impacts the body, like about hypoxia hyperventilation.”