Dr. Delbert Hahn
On a recent mission, Dr. Delbert Hahn and his wife, Peg, took 8-eight-year-old Levi E. to St. Louis to receive medical care at Shriner’s Hospital there. Pictured left to right are Levi’s mother Bonnie, Dr. Delbert Hahn and Peg Hahn, with Levi in the front. Photo courtesy of Nanci Schwartz.
One glance at the ad, “Learn to fly for $5!” and Vestavia radiologist Delbert Hahn, then a cash-strapped pre-med student at Marquette University, was immediately transported back to his childhood in Milwaukee.
At a time when other 4-year-olds were riding bicycles, Delbert was riding high above them, soaring through the skies in a DC-3 operated by his father, a bomber pilot in World War II.
Though he’d hardly given the hobby much thought since then, that ad was all the prompting Delbert needed to fall in love with aviation all over again.
One lesson in, and he was hooked.
The hobby cost him more than a few girlfriends, who were quick to make their disdain for his passion known.
But then, along came Peg.
“Most girls would take one look at the plane and say, ‘I’m not getting in that thing!’” said Delbert. “But Peg was so curious. She wanted to know all about stalls, and spins, and after I did these maneuvers in the plane, she shocked me by saying, ‘Do it again!’ I thought to myself, I better keep this one.”
Indeed, he eventually proposed to Peg, asking her, “Will you be my copilot?”
For most of their marriage, and a healthy portion of Del’s almost 7,000 service hours, she’s been exactly that.
When the couple’s three children were young, flying was for leisure.
These days, Peg is most likely sitting in the cabin of their Mitsubishi MU-2, where she tends to any number of individuals who connect with the Hahns through their affiliation with Mercy Flight Southeast.
Mercy Flight Southeast is a nonprofit volunteer pilot organization that provides free air transportation by private aircraft to distant medical facilities. Since the early 1990s, the Hahns have donated their plane, their time and their financial resources to the purpose.
“It isn’t cheap, but God always provides,” said Delbert, adding that the endeavor is an act of service both he and Peg feel called to do. “Many people reach a point in life when you give thanks to God for what you’ve been given. Everybody, every person, has different gifts. I’m not a teacher. I cannot cook. Habitat for Humanity would not want me to show up and try to build a house. But I can fly airplanes. I can use that to give back to God and be of service to others.”
Peg, a Milwaukee native, shares in his gratitude.
“We love the Southern people,” said Peg. “Northerners don’t talk about religion. Your religion is your business. But here, I can say that God has given us many blessings, and no one judges me for saying that.”
On an average of one to two times per month, they participate in Mercy Flight runs. Often, the runs are to medical facilities like MD Anderson. Other times, they are to places of peace for the passengers.
On one such occasion, the Hahns were visiting their daughter in Chicago when they received a flight request for nonstop travel from Chicago to Miami. The patient was a 13-year-old dying of ovarian cancer.
“That flight was unlike anything we’ve ever encountered,” said Peg, recalling the heartbreak with which the patient’s mother and grandmother tried to settle her into the cabin. “Though she’d been dealing with terrible nausea and vomiting pre-flight, about a half hour into the flight, she settled in and fell asleep. About an hour later, so did her mother and grandmother. The atmosphere in the cabin was so beautiful and so peaceful. We felt this was something very extraordinary we were doing. Her wish was to be at her grandmother’s Miami home when she died, and indeed, she passed away the very next day.”
