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"I'm a flying junkie," Tom Stuker, 65, told The New York Post.
“If I spend more than a week in one place, I’m like, ‘I gotta get back in the air.’ I’m more afraid to be on the ground than in the air.”
Ruker, who racks up his flight time on United, was recognized for the milestone a few weeks ago -- just a few months after Stuker reached the 20 million-mile mark in January.
"That's the fastest I've ever done a million," he said.
Married and a father of three, Stuker's obsession with spending time airborne began in 1984 during a business trip to Australia. Since then, he's been on hundreds of additional trips to the Asia-Pacific region and elsewhere -- and not always for business or leisure, but often just for the sake of going.
“All of a sudden, after I hit 10 million [miles], I started getting into the world records and flying more competitively,” Stuker said.
The distance Stuker has flown to date, 21 million miles, is equivalent to nearly 844 trips around the Equator. It's also just 3 million miles shy of the distance to Venus when that planet is at its closest to the Earth.
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