Page 6 - February 2015 Volume 9, Number 2

Some 85 King Airs have flown the combat-wounded through Veterans Airlift Command
by MeLinda Schnyder
T he request from Veterans Airlift Command (VAC) was the kind that Jim Harris loves to say yes to. The organization needed him to fly the first leg of a trip that would take the wife of a wounded warrior from her home in Buffalo,
New York, to be by his side at a military hospital burn center in San Antonio, Texas. As he does with all VAC missions, Harris immediately contacted the passenger to discuss timing. She requested they leave in four days and asked if she could bring her 15-month-old son and her parents. The Beechcraft King Air 200C had plenty of room for her family, he told her.
had told her there was no way she could fly with the newborn, but when they realized she was flying on a private aircraft instead of going through the terminals they gave her the go-ahead.”
Breg Hughes, a com- mander in the U.S. Army Special Forces, also known as the Green Berets, suffered burns over 50 percent of his body when his Humvee ignited a roadside bomb in
“So I picked her up in Buffalo and when she came out to the airplane she had her 15-month-old and a one-week-old newborn,” Harris said. “The doctors
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Afghanistan just days before he was scheduled to go on leave to be at his wife’s side for the birth of their second son. He’d been back in the States and in intensive
FEBRUARY 2015
Serving Those W
h