Living the dream as an Air Force refueling specialist
Oct 08, 2024 09:22AM ● By Tom Haraldsen
A KC-135 tanker refuels an Air Force jet, something Mark Hasara did at sites around the world. (Photo courtesy Mark Hasara)
It’s said that we should be doing what we’re meant to do with our lives, not just what we want to do. But when they’re the same thing, it’s a great blessing.
Mark Hasara knows the feeling. From the time he was a 5-year-old boy in Southern California, he knew flying airplanes was his passion. Along with two siblings, Mark watched as huge jetliners—Pan Am Boeing 707s and Delta DC-8s in those days in the early ‘60s–would take off and land at Los Angeles International Airport near his grandmother’s home. And he was hooked.
“There was a fence at the end of the runway, 26 left and right, which are the two south runways at LAX, and we’d go with our grandfather who would park underneath the approach path,” he recalled from his home in South Jordan. “We’d go to Randy’s donuts–well known for its huge donut sign, and grab three each and then go watch the planes. Sometimes we even stood on the hood of my grandfather’s car and waved at the pilots. And once, while taxiing out for takeoff, one pilot actually stuck his head out the window of the cockpit and waved back before he closed the window, turned the plane towards the main runway and then took off! I will never forget it.”
He says almost any aviator can tell you the moment when they knew they wanted to fly. Hasara never lost that desire, even after his family moved north to San Jose and “a lot of classmates’ parents were IBM executives. I started building plastic model airplanes as a kid. I read everything I could about flying, particularly military flying. I did a lot of research on many famous pilots and famous military battles, and this was at a time when we were going to the moon, when humans were flying to new heights.”
Through the years, he’s never lost that love of building models. As an adult, he traveled to Okinawa, Japan, and he tells what happened there.
“There’s two very famous classic model airplane manufacturers in Japan, Tamia and Hasegawa. I went over there with 25 model kits. I came back five years later with 805! My wife would say it’s become an illness, not a hobby. True. But I learned about airplanes from building these little models and learning about the wheels, my cockpits and air propellers, jets, all the weapons and everything.”
Before his marriage and after serving a mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, he went to Rick’s College (now BYU-Idaho) for a year, then transferred to BYU in Provo. He couldn’t decide on a major, but knew “I wanted to study whatever would get me out of college the fastest. So I chose political science with an emphasis in national security and got involved with the ROTC in Provo. I was lucky, because this was during the military buildup under President Ronald Reagan.”
His ROTC class got 21 slots into the military–higher than most schools were getting–but there was a backup in the pipeline for pilot training. So Hasara bided his time restocking shelves at the ZCMI at University Mall and pumping gas at a service station in the morning. But Air Force training eventually came, and he was sent to Vance Air Force Base in
Enid, Oklahoma.
His history as a pilot could fill volumes. For more than 24 years, and through four wars, he flew the KC-135 refueling planes, “passing gas for a living,” he said with a smile to hundreds of aircraft. He’s traveled all over the world at 28,000 feet with a Stratotanker aircraft filled with literally tons of fuel. During the operations in the Middle East in 2002 and 2003, his team of 30 US and international refueling experts transferred enough fuel to keep a 737-type airliner airborne for almost 12 years, or enough to make 2,685 round trips to the moon in a Ford
F-150 truck.
Though as a U.S. Air Force retired Lieutenant Colonel, he no longer flies those refueling tankers, he still has a keen sense of their importance to the defense mission of the
US military.
“Our motto is ‘Nobody kicks a… without tanker gas.’ You cannot go to war and do a big air campaign without air refueling tankers. But we no longer have enough refueling assets to do potentially two wars. It’s a money thing, and even though there are still almost 400 if the KC-135’s still in operation, it wouldn’t be enough if we are fighting in two different (military) theaters. Refueling capability is essential to military success.”
His knowledge of aircraft and his experience has made Hasara a well-known and much sought after speaker, a nationally known podcaster (https://markhasara.com/episodes/), and an Amazon best-selling author of “Tanker Pilot: Lessons from the Cockpit.” The forward for his book was written by his good friend, the late Rush Limbaugh. He’s an artist and a photographer, with his office lined with images of aircraft old and new, military and commercial. Many can be seen on his website at
markhasara.com. λ