“During Katrina we tried really hard to go in the front door,” said Eissler.
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Her company contacted Stevenson and her husband for advice on how to get into the disaster area and sought ways they could help alleviate the suffering. “Being separated from critically ill newborns is a tough thing to endure,” she said, “so my personal involvement in Care arose from the separation of Nicu babies from their parents during Hurricane Katrina, and that was my call to action, trying to get those parents back to those children.”Įissler, who is currently vice president of aircraft broker Jetquest, said the company was able to use one of the aircraft in its inventory for relief flights. Her newly delivered twins were in a Florida hospital’s neonatal intensive care unit (Nicu) when Hurricane Jeanne roared ashore, forcing her and her husband’s evacuation. Through communications on networks such as NBAA’s Airmail online forum, the couple made contact with others in the industry with similar ideas.Īmong them was Robin Eissler, herself a hurricane evacuee a year earlier, who felt empathy for the Katrina victims. They began organizing relief flights into Baton Rouge, carrying supplies in and refugees out. “It was 24 hours after Katrina hit and we were wondering why nobody was responding.” Her husband, Doug, a corporate pilot, spoke with his employer at the time, who allowed him use of the company’s Challenger in any way that he could find to help.
Care president Marianne Stevenson recalled the seeming inertia that existed after the hurricane slammed into New Orleans. “The generosity and selflessness of the Care volunteers ensured that medical teams, life-sustaining supplies and other much needed equipment reached children and families in need.”Ĭare (not to be confused with the international charity CARE), which grew out of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, started as a small group of people with ties to business aviation who felt they could make a difference to the devastated Gulf Coast community. “NBAA has been proud to work with Care and support its outstanding efforts to help coordinate the business aviation community’s response to the Haiti crisis,” said NBAA president Ed Bolen. Immediately after the disaster, the group acted as the focal point for the business aviation community’s emergency relief effort. While it is impossible to place a value on the number of lives saved by the timely delivery of critical supplies and medical personnel, the cost of the flight hours of volunteered business aircraft equates to more than $3 million, according to Corporate Aviation Responding in Emergencies (Care), the industry first-response network that arranged for hundreds of flights into and out of Haiti and the neighboring Dominican Republic carrying thousands of passengers and tons of crucial relief supplies.
The island nation’s ruined capital, Port-au-Prince–re-opened two days later as Toussaint L’Ouverture International Airport–the main gateway to Soon after the magnitude-7.0 earthquake struck Haiti on January 12, killing more than 200,000 people and displacing more than a million more, relief began arriving by air.
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