Former race car driver Hayden Pullen leaves limits behind as aerial stuntman

Aug 10, 2023

Hayden Pullen is a firm believer in pushing past the limits of his comfort zone.

It's a useful mantra to follow when the 55-year-old aerial stunt pilot straps himself into a seven-metre plane and plummets towards the ground with a black plume of smoke trailing behind him.

"I absolutely live and breathe it," Pullen said.

"It can be dangerous and that's the first thing someone thinks."

But he's no stranger to the world of high-adrenaline sports — for decades, Pullen has raced cars on some of Australia's most well-known tracks.

Pullen's need for speed was ignited when he started racing trucks as a teen in Wagga Wagga, New South Wales.

Eventually he started his own business building race car engines.

But what started as a hobby would eventually lead him to compete in the V8 Supercar series in 2009.

He still holds the lap records he set at the Winton 300 in 2010.

"I've pretty well raced anything I possibly could, every weekend of my life," Pullen said.

An encounter with an ex-military pilot at a flight training school in Wagga Wagga convinced him to finish attaining his pilot's licence in 2009.

"He took me for some for some loops and stuff in his RV-7 and I thought, 'This is just great. I love this stuff — I don't want to fly straight ever again,'" Pullen said.

"The trouble is I got sick — I actually got really nauseous and I pushed myself through that day."

Pullen bought his first single-engine aircraft and pursued a career in stunt aerobatics.

"I think the motor skill of driving cars makes flying an aircraft really easy and to be honest anyone could do it," he said.

"We just tell everyone it's hard to make us look good."

Pullen said countless hours of preparation were required to produce a few minutes of an aeroabatic routine.

But with a rigorous training regime that involved flying every day, he said even the most complex flights could become "a walk in the park".

"You just have to make sure you focus the mental side of it," Pullen said.

"I walk through the sequence 100 times and before I can do a display, we have to fly it 100 times as well," he said.

"Something could snap into a flat spin and what you do about that has to just happen straight away."

Pullen has specialised in gyroscopic techniques involving somersaults and tumbles.

It's not all smooth sailing at 450 kilometres per hour.

"When it does go wrong, you just have to have a giggle about it and take your time gathering it back up," Pullen said.

"If it's not going wrong, you're not trying to invent new manoeuvres enough."

He has become accustomed to the ferocious roar of his single-engine plane as he tears across the sky, but he said he had never forgotten the thrill of burning rubber in a race car.

"I'd love to just jump in one and do a couple of laps," Pullen said.

"It does tempt me."

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