✈️🐾 Pup, Pup and Away

It's a bird, it's a plane... it's a dog in a plane! 

David Tan of Middleton, Wisconsin, is no newbie to the skies. The Midwestern pilot spent 40 years flying military, commercial, and private planes before his retirement around ten years ago.

While David may be professionally retired, nothing can keep him away from the air. In his free time, he still flies his Aermacchi SF-260, a tiny two-person Italian plane – the same model in which he first learned to fly all those years ago.

• Pilots have to log a certain amount of airborne hours each month to keep their licenses. So instead of simply drifting around with no destination in mind, David spends his time flying by paying it forward... with puppies.🐶 

🐾 Pilots N Paws... David volunteers for Pilots N Paws, a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization with one goal in mind: to save the lives of innocent animals. 

As a pilot, his job is to rescue high-risk shelter pets and transport them to better rescues, rehabilitation centers, or sometimes even their forever homes around the country.  

Since he started volunteering with Pilots N Paws in 2012, David has successfully transported over 360 dogs, 23 cats, 3 frostbitten goats, a potbelly pig, and even a bat named Bruce (of course).🦇

🏆 The real MVPs... David's rescue flights are completely voluntary, with all costs for the trips coming out of his own pocket. While many rescues and adopters have tried to pay him, he always donates the money back to the animal shelters where he picked up the pets in the first place.

• “They’re always short [on money], especially when it comes to medical care for the animals,” David said. “It just costs so much nowadays... The people who really pull the weight are the rescues.”