Aviating to
the next
challenge

MATT GUTHMILLER HAS A SECRET for making the impossible possible: he breaks seemingly overwhelming challenges down into small individual pieces. Before setting the record for the youngest solo around-the-world flight in 2014, he had little flying experience, didn’t own a plane and hadn’t flown further than from South Dakota to Iowa and back. But did that deter him? Not a bit.

It took him a year, but he tackled each of the challenges methodically, one by one: finding a plane, collecting sponsors, picking the brains of the small community of aerial circumnavigators for advice on logistics. “You figure out one step, then another, and then you get to the next,” he says. “It’s all of those things—and keeping the drive and determination to make it happen.”

Of course, the challenges were not limited to the preparation stage. Flying solo around the world involves covering vast distances, whether crossing oceans or making it to the next place where fuel is available. Some of Matt’s flights were 16.5 hours long, not including several hours before that spent prepping the plane. Despite his fatigue, he had to stay awake, alert and capable of making life or death advance decisions about the weather. “Those are some incredibly long days,” says Matt. “It was physically draining and intense.”

While Matt used a single-engine Beechcraft Bonanza for his record-setting round-the-world flight, more recently he’s become a big fan of jet trainers and vintage fighter jets, attracted by what he refers to as their “inherent cool factor.” Strapping into a swept-wing jet fighter developed in the late 1940s makes him feel as though he’s stepping back in time and gives him a sense of how test pilot Chuck Yaeger must have felt when he broke the sound barrier. Outside the nostalgia factor, he loves the raw, challenging handling characteristics, the high speeds and the sheer freedom.

In 2023, after his first year of pilot racing school, Matt took part in the Reno Air Races flying an Aero Vodochody L-39 Albatross, a light training jet, in “uncooperative” formation. Air racing, he says, is the hardest thing he has ever done. “You have to be so focused,” he explains. “You can't blink because you're going 500 miles an hour, maybe 50 feet above the ground, and there's another airplane 20 feet away. You don't have time to think about what you're doing. You enter this flow state where everything else goes away. You're just in that moment, in the cockpit, focused on flying and staying alive and like staying in the race. It's intense.”

In 2024, Matt marked the 10-year anniversary of his first solo round-the-world flight by doing it again, this time in a turboprop TBM 850. While the flight was that much easier, faster and more comfortable than in the Bonanza, it came with challenges of its own. Take the Japan-to-Alaska leg of the flight as an example. Without the possibility of any stopover, the distance was huge. With the simpler Bonanza, Matt had added extra fuel tanks, but that was not an option with the more complex TBM. Instead, Matt had to wait weeks to get precisely the right weather conditions and tailwind to ensure he could reach Alaska without running out of fuel. 

Rather than going out to a few thousand fans as stills on Facebook, Matt’s account of his second round-the-world flight is going out as a slick TV show. It’s vintage Guthmiller: iterate and improve, iterate and improve. The tagline of CITIZEN PROMASTER is “Go Beyond” and Matt has been about pushing limits, overcoming obstacles and expanding possibilities ever since he was a teenager.  Asked to sum up his life philosophy, he says: “I like to push the envelope—do things that most people never will. If something’s theoretically possible, there’s no reason you or I can’t do it. I don’t often take “no” for an answer. If there’s something I want to do, come hell or high water, I’ll find a way to make it happen.”