When an earthquake struck Haiti in 2010, a group of volunteer pilots coordinated 715 flights that brought more than a million pounds of critical supplies to the island nation and transported 3,800 passengers, including medical personnel, injured patients and relief workers.
Pilots and aircraft owners have donated 13,000 flights to wounded veterans for medical and other compassionate purposes covering more than 7.8 million miles through Veterans Airlift Command.
Volunteers in all 50 states fly more than 15,000 rescue animals each year for Pilots N Paws, just one of many organizations devoted to animal transport.
Every day of the year there are flights taking off across the U.S. and across borders to assist with patient and non-emergency medical transport, disaster relief, animal rescue, environmental causes, and educational and public services support. These flights wouldn’t happen without the volunteers who donate their time, aircraft and operating expenses.
Many of these organizations say they are lucky to count King Air pilots among their volunteers; all would love to see more King Air pilots participate – whether for one flight a month or one a year. The same characteristics that made the King Air your choice for air transportation are also valuable to these non-profits: safety, dependability, pressurization, climate control, cargo and passenger capacity.
In the spirit of the giving season, we would like to introduce King Air readers to some of the personalities in the volunteer pilot community and the resources available. We hope you’ll be inspired.
Referral Sites
A great place to start if you’re thinking of volunteering is a referral website that lists a variety of groups seeking pilots. You’ll learn a little about many organizations, then you can dig deeper into those that connect with your passion or operate in your area.
Air Care Alliance (aircarealliance.org) has one of the most extensive lists: 80 volunteer-based charitable aviation transportation groups. You can sort by services provided or by geography, and there’s a short description of each with contact information. ACA formed as an umbrella organization in 1990 after Bill Worden, a pilot and board member of Angel Flight West, and Rol Murrow of the Emergency Volunteer Air Corps convened the leaders of volunteer pilot organizations, many of which had started in the 1980s.
Milwaukee animal rescue pilot Chris Roy invented a software platform to help him organize the volunteer flights he accepts. It helps him easily route and coordinate entire trips using Google Maps, so he decided to share the software with the entire animal rescue community in 2014. Named for one of his cats, Doobert (doobert.com) is a portal to connect rescues, shelters and transport groups with volunteers, from pilots or drivers to fosters or photographers.
Roy said 13,000 volunteers have registered on the site, including about 500 pilots. When you set up a pilot profile in Doobert, you enter information such as the days of the week you’re available to fly, the distance you’re willing to travel and how many pets you can transport. The software only sends you notifications for the transportation requests that meet your requirements.
Nearly 400 rescue groups and shelters in the U.S. and Canada use the site to connect with volunteers, and Doobert powers the rescue flights of transport groups including Flying Fur Rescue, Flying Dog Rescue, Pilots to the Rescue and Pilot.Dog. “The estimate is that there are 20,000 rescue groups in the country and around 3,500 shelters, so there’s still a huge population to make aware of this free tool designed for them,” Roy said.
He also hopes making it easier for volunteer pilots will encourage more to help save animals’ lives. “Doobert puts the power in your hands – you don’t have to do this every day or even every week. If you want to do a flight every two months you can,” Roy said. “There’s always a need because there’s still four million animals that are euthanized each year. It’s not an overpopulation problem, it’s a logistics problem. If you move these animals to where there is demand, they can live long, healthy lives.”
Animal Rescue
In 15 years of flying animal rescue missions, Jeff Luizza has come across only a handful of other King Air owners donating their time and airplane to transport pets to their new forever-homes or moving animals doomed for euthanasia to communities where they have a better chance of being adopted.
“The expense is pretty substantial but life’s been good to us and this is a way to give back,” said Luizza, who flies a 1981 King Air C90 that he has owned for 10 years. “I feel like I’m really doing something that’s important. In some of the rural areas, the distances are too far to drive the dogs and if it wasn’t for the pilots these dogs wouldn’t stand a chance, they would be put down.”
Reasons to Become a Volunteer Pilot
Combine passions: Unite your love of flight with a cause you care about.
Become an advocate: Learn about important issues.
Use your skills: Put your talent and aircraft to good use.
Stay current: You’ll have a great reason to fly regularly.
Be challenged: Accept missions to new airports.
Warm fuzzies: Doing good makes you feel good.
Sense of community: You’ll bond with other volunteers and those you help.
Tax deductible: Check with your accountant if you fly for a 501(c)(3). Flight training may also be tax deductible if students fly missions with their instructors.
Luizza has flown 2,540 animals in those 15 years (he sold his business and retired nine years ago). His numbers have increased since he created a personal Facebook page three years ago and began posting about his flights. As more rescue groups and shelters have found him, he’s accumulated 240 volunteer flight hours in just the past three years, including a year when he transported 800 animals.
To justify the expense, Luizza tries to coordinate flights involving no fewer than 20 animals and focuses on cases where the animals are being moved from a shelter where they are scheduled to be put down to a rescue group or home. He and his wife spend their winters in Florida and their summers in Pennsylvania, and most of his rescue missions are within 400 nautical miles from his location.
He most often transports dogs but has also helped kittens and even a 17-day-old female chimpanzee whose mother had rejected her. She needed to move from Maryland to Florida, where a surrogate mother was available. He once was able to fit 60 puppies on one flight.
“The King Air gives us a lot of capacity, and I’ve got an 1,100-pound gross weight increase that takes it up to 10,500 pounds,” Luizza said. “We can fill it with fuel, fill the cabin and still fly away.”
Other benefits of using a King Air for animal rescue, he said, include a cabin that makes the animals as comfortable as possible during a stressful move and its all-weather capability. “Many of the pilots who do this are very weather dependent,” Luizza said.
On the other side of the country, Chris and Jackie Gaertner are using their 2013 King Air C90GTx for regional animal rescue flights from their home in the San Francisco Bay area. King Air magazine featured their volunteer work for Pilots N Paws and Angel Flight West in a 2014 article. The couple has been flying together since Chris earned his pilot’s license in 1983. Now that her two sons are grown and inspired by the satisfaction of making a positive impact through volunteer missions, Jackie earned her pilot’s license in 2015.
Since 2013, the Gaertners have flown more than 250 multi-animal missions for Pilots N Paws. With the help of 5,000 volunteer pilots in all 50 states, the organization facilitates flights for more than 15,000 rescue animals each year through a web-based message board. Pilots N Paws sends pilots free equipment such as crates, harnesses, collars and leashes to use on the flights.
Disaster Relief
Alongside Civil Air Patrol, an auxiliary of the U.S. Air Force that uses its fleet of aircraft to support search-and-rescue, disaster relief and to promote aviation to the next generation of pilots, are grassroots organizations looking for pilots to donate their aircraft and crew to disaster relief. The idea is to have available resources identified and processes in place before the next emergency.
AEROBridge is a National Business Aviation Association-endorsed organization that matches private aircraft with emergency response teams and critical supplies during catastrophic emergencies. The group first mobilized to respond to Hurricane Katrina in 2005 then activated again in 2010 when the earthquake hit Haiti. The most recent major operation was in support of Hurricane Sandy in 2012, although some resources were deployed this year in response to help needed during Hurricane Matthew.
Alan Staats, a professional photographer who serves as volunteer vice president of media relations for the organization, said all series of King Airs have flown for AEROBridge. Oftentimes the donated models have wing lockers or cargo pods to supplement the already impressive cabin volume.
“If you’re bringing a couple hundred thousand water purification tablets, it takes up a lot of room, but not a lot of weight, so you can literally throw a couple million doses of pharmaceuticals into a King Air,” Staats said. “The King Air is a wonderful platform to do this type of work. It’s really valuable to be able to mix a load, getting two or three people on board and still haul a ton of supplies.”
Environmental Conservation
“What does flying have to do with conservation?” is a question Terri Watson loves to answer. She is the CEO of a non-profit whose mission is to accelerate conservation success through the perspective of flight and she’s a long-time pilot with more than 11,000 hours in helicopters and airplanes, including King Air 350, 200 and 90 variants.
Conservation groups can use aircraft as tools in saving the lives of endangered species, collecting data through surveys or photography and showing decision-makers an issue or landscape first-hand. Most groups can’t afford to use aircraft though, so LightHawk leverages a nationwide network of volunteer pilots to donate time, aircraft and fuel costs to make the aerial perspective available.
In 2015, LightHawk’s volunteer corps of 240 pilots flew 444 missions with 817 passengers for 129 different conservation organizations on 99 different conservation projects across the U.S., Canada and Mexico. Flying for LightHawk, Watson said, gives their flying a purpose and turns many pilots who weren’t initially conservationists into advocates.
A King Air 100 pilot based in Sedona, Arizona, is just starting to volunteer with LightHawk and will be used for important work in the southwest. Access to the King Air 100 will allow one of LightHawk’s partners, the Sonoran Institute, to take larger groups of stakeholders on longer “hearts and minds” flights – the term LightHawk uses for taking stakeholders in the air to see the big picture on an issue. In this case, the flights will include individuals who are part of legislation negotiation between the U.S and Mexico over water rights on the Colorado River, America’s most endangered river.
“Seeing the terrain and issue in real-time in the immersive experience of an airplane is very effective at bringing about an ‘aha’ moment of understanding and motivation to do something about it,” Watson said. “That’s a great mission in the King Air: you’ve got good visibility and usually a comfortable ride with pressurization and air conditioning.”
Another example of how the King Air could be used is rehab and release flights for Mexican wolves. “We focus on providing transport where it helps with species survival of something endangered and the transport couldn’t happen if we weren’t there,” Watson said. “If you’re moving a Mexican wolf, they are very temperature sensitive. If you try to move them by vehicle or by commercial transport in an airplane, you can’t control the temperature and they could die. When we move them, we can control the temperature in the aircraft and the entire move is orchestrated so we arrive based on the temperature at specific times of day. We have that level of schedule control with a LightHawk flight.”
Patient Transport
Transporting patients who need medical care they can’t get in their local area is one of the largest categories of volunteer opportunities. Angel Flight has a large system of organizations across the country, while smaller operations focus on a specific geographic area or type of patient, for example children, cancer patients, veterans.
Veterans Airlift Command is a national network of volunteer aircraft owners and pilots providing free air transportation for medical and other compassionate purposes to post-9/11 combat-wounded soldiers and their families. King Airs are some of the most popular aircraft for VAC missions because they offer passengers comfortable flights – non-stop routes, flying above weather and plenty of cabin room for family members, service dogs or medical equipment.
According to Jen Salvati, executive director, the organization has coordinated nearly 13,000 flights covering more than 7.8 million miles with the generosity of more than 2,500 pilots and owners. That includes 90 King Air pilots who have signed up for the VAC network and volunteered for missions.
In 2015, King Air magazine featured two pilots who regularly fly for VAC: Neil Hise, the second-generation owner of a New Mexico-based manufacturing company who flies a 1996 King Air C90SE, and Jim Harris, flying a 1981 King Air 200C owned by his employer, CHI Aviation headquartered in Michigan. Both are still flying VAC missions.
CHI Aviation is scheduled this month to fly its 43rd volunteer mission; most have been for VAC, along with a few for Honor Flight Network, which transports veterans to Washington, D.C. to visit memorials honoring their service and sacrifice. Harris recently flew a 92-year-old World War II veteran from southern Michigan to Traverse City, where he took part in a donated flight on an airliner with other veterans.
In November, Hise flew three missions on his way to and from VAC’s annual fundraiser, bringing his total to 32. In addition to signing up for missions posted on veteransairlift.org, Hise lets VAC know when he’s on a business trip with room for passengers.
“The volunteer pilots and people that donate their planes and pilots that allow our veterans to travel without the humiliation of enduring TSA inspection at commercial airports are just wonderful and caring people,” said Hise, who’s been flying since 1968 and has 6,000 hours total flight time. “You meet some of the most wonderful people when you’re doing this – from the veterans and their families to the people running VAC. And the FBOs almost always step up, offering a fuel discount, waving ramp fees and bending over backward to help.”
To find more information about the non-profits and transport groups mentioned in this article:
AEROBridge: aerobridge.org
Air Care Alliance: aircarealliance.org
Angel Flight West: angelflightwest.org
Doobert: doobert.com
Emergency Volunteer Air Corps: evac.org
Flying Dog Rescue: flyingdogrescue.com
Flying Fur Rescue: flyingfuranimalrescue.org
Honor Flight Network: honorflight.org
LightHawk: lighthawk.org
Pilot.dog: pilot.dog
Pilots N Paws: pilotsnpaws.org
Pilots to the Rescue: pilotstotherescue.org
Veterans Airlift Command: veteransairlift.org
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