Pilots, Wildlife, and A View for Good

When conservationists, scientists, and decisionmakers lift off in a small airplane, the new perspective can tell a story that can’t always be seen clearly from below. That is how LightHawk got started more than four decades ago, using the perspective of general aviation to support conservation. 

The nonprofit, which directs most of its efforts toward endangered animal conservation, coordinates hundreds of flights each year at no cost to its wildlife partners. It pairs a variety of missions with a nationwide roster of volunteer pilots and aircraft to monitor watersheds, survey wild places, document coastal changes, and transport endangered wildlife. 

As LightHawk CEO Jim Becker put it, “Our bread-and-butter mission is to get people in the air to see what’s happening on the ground.” Scientists, journalists, photographers, videographers, and government officials are among the regular passengers on these flights, each designed to show the right eyes the right view at the right time.

The organization’s origin story is quintessential general aviation: a pilot, an airplane, and a place at risk. It began when founder Michael Stewart learned of a proposed coal-fired plant in a sensitive area near his home in the Southwest. “He started…taking up first, friends, and then he took up journalists and photographers and county commissioners,” Becker said. The plant, he noted, “never got permitted,” and the perspective from an aircraft proved its power: “The view from, you know, 1,000 to 4,000 feet agl is, is exactly where you need to be if you want to understand what’s going on [in] the environment.”

Since that 1979 effort, the organization has evolved with its mission. After a period in which LightHawk owned a small fleet of its own aircraft, it sold the last one in about 2018, according to Becker, and completed a transition to an all-volunteer fleet model. Today, the aircraft are owned by companies and individuals and flown by volunteer pilots across the country—from taildraggers to turboprops—with LightHawk’s staff matching each conservation request to the right pilot and platform. 

The pace is steady: “Last year we put up about 240 flights,” Becker said in June, adding that the group expected “about 15 to 20% more than that” by the end of this year. Inside the cockpit, the work can be as straightforward as a photo flight over a river delta or as complex as using telemetry to search for missing birds in rugged terrain. It is also, by design, demanding. Many missions fly low and slow, circle precisely over a target, and require continuous coordination between the pilot and observers.

If the aerial survey is the organization’s classic mission, the transport of endangered species is its defining story. About a decade ago, Becker said, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and partner organizations approached LightHawk about moving animals between breeding facilities and release sites. The goal, on its face, was simple: reduce stress, improve outcomes, and speed transfers. “Putting them on an airline and as cargo is hugely traumatic to the animals,” he said. 

The work focuses on listed or threatened species and includes two distinct patterns: moving animals between breeding facilities to maintain genetic diversity, and delivering animals—often very young—to reintroduction sites in the wild.

One of LightHawk’s most evocative missions involved Mexican wolves. “They were down to about 10 or 11 wild wolves left,” Becker said, describing a program that captured remaining wolves and built a breeding network. Pups just “one or two weeks old” are then placed in wild dens—a technique called cross-fostering—so a wild female raises them as her own. “It’s really quite a process,” he said. “Now…there’s almost 300 wild Mexican wolves out there, and another couple hundred in breeding sites.” 

The logistics behind those flights can be intricate. Becker recalled a multi-aircraft shuttle in which he “spent the first couple weeks of January…flying right seat in [a] Pilatus” to move wolves from northern British Columbia to Colorado. The PC-12 was the right tool: “The interior…can handle five crates, and we used every cubic inch that was available.” To protect the airplane and load efficiently, the team relied on simple but ingenious tools. “You get furniture movers, the little discs that you can use to slide furniture around. And you put the crate into the door, and you put a furniture disk under each corner so that you aren’t tearing up the floor of the airplane, and slide it forward.” The sensory memory stayed with him, too: “The aroma of five wild wolves…was almost overpowering.”

Animal welfare is central to LightHawk’s transport protocols, Becker said. “When you’re dealing with the adult wolves, the crate is lined with straw, and it’s also lined with plastic…And there’s also a big block of ice there.” Through the perforations in the crate, handlers can monitor each animal. “When you look into that crate, you see a very intelligent creature looking back at you, wondering, ‘What the hell are you doing?’” The wolves are typically quiet in flight. On arrival, “the doors are opened up, and the wolf…comes flying out of the [crate], sprints to the nearest tree line and turns around and looks again, going, ‘What the hell just happened?’”

California condors offer a different window into LightHawk’s work—part transport, part search.  Becker called the species “another real success story.” LightHawk has transported birds from breeding facilities to release sites, and the aircraft allow field teams to cover vast distances efficiently. The crates are smaller than those used for wolves and can fit into a Cessna 182 with the rear seats removed. 

Beyond transport, LightHawk supports “telemetry flights as well, looking for missing condors,” chief advancement officer Joanna Weitzel said, underscoring that aerial platforms can serve both reintroduction and monitoring. The same approach extends to other species work when needed: “We have transported cheetah cubs,” Weitzel said. General aviation flights can accommodate caretakers on board, which is critical for young animals that require attention during long transits.

Not every mission crosses a border, and relatively few do. More commonly, LightHawk’s endangered species missions move animals within the U.S., across distances that would otherwise require long, stressful road trips. Within the broader portfolio, conservation flights also support indigenous communities and cultural priorities. One LightHawk pilot, Becker noted, “loves to…take Navajo tribal elders up to fly along the cliffs to count the…golden eagles,” an activity aligned with cultural traditions and wildlife management.

Matching the right pilot to the right mission is both an art and a system. “When we get a mission,” Becker said, “one of our program managers gets a request for a flight… [and] then it goes on the Mission Board,” a site accessible by LightHawk volunteers. “Usually there’s 50 to 60 missions on that mission board,” each with enough detail for a pilot to assess aircraft suitability, route feasibility, and schedule. Pilots tend to find a niche—such as wildlife transport, photography, or low-level survey—and return for more. 

The organization’s safety bar is high: “You have to have 1,000 hours of [PIC] time,” Becker said, and pilot onboarding includes references and interviews. Over the nonprofit’s history, he added, “we’ve only had one or two accidents, and those… were 25 years ago.”

The pilots’ motivations, unsurprisingly, are not transactional. “Pilots need to fly, right? So they’re always looking for reasons to fly,” Becker said. The feedback after a few missions is consistent: “They said LightHawk is the best use of a general aviation airplane that there possibly is.”

That sense of purpose is evident in the aircraft and effort that donors bring to bear. For some missions, “Pilatus pilots actually strip out the interior of their airplane,” Becker said, to make room for large crates and handlers. In spring, when timing is tight for cross-fostering wolf pups, Weitzel said the organization “need[s] more more long-range fast aircraft,” because the day can start before dawn and span multiple handoffs to meet biological windows at distant dens. In Becker’s words: “We need more heavy iron.”

If the aircraft and pilots are the nonprofit’s backbone, funding keeps the system running. “The cost of operating the aircraft is totally borne by our volunteer pilots,” Becker said, an in-kind contribution that makes flights possible for partners that could not otherwise afford it. LightHawk covers staffing and operations through “both individual donors and… grants from various foundations,” and is “expanding our partnerships with corporations as well,” Weitzel said.

LightHawk is also formalizing how aviation businesses can plug into its mission through the Wings for Conservation corporate-partner program launching in 2026. Contribution tiers range from $1,000 to $20,000. Benefits emphasize visibility with mission-aligned audiences, co-branded storytelling, and collaboration on strategic initiatives that advance stewardship while highlighting aviation’s role in these efforts.

What makes LightHawk distinctive is how the elements fit together. Program staff bring conservation and environmental science expertise to vet requests and shape each flight; volunteer pilots bring aircraft, airmanship, and a willingness to do the meticulous work behind a smooth mission day; partners bring problems that can be seen—and solved—more clearly from the air.

The personal connections are as important as any metric. Pilots often “love to fly with the passengers that are on the plane,” Becker said, because the learning runs both ways. For Weitzel, the measure of success is what happens after a safe landing: less stress on transported animals compared to other transportation modes, more informed decisions about land and water, and images that change how people think about a place. In the end, those results—wolves sprinting into the tree line, a condor seen and saved, a watershed documented before it is lost—are what justify the effort.

LightHawk began with a simple premise: if people could see what was at stake, they might act differently. Decades later, that premise still holds. The airplanes are privately owned now; the flights are donated; the missions are broader; the partners more varied. But the core is unchanged: the perspective and power of aviation can help reshape the world for the better.