QUESTION: What stopped the relief flights between the Burlington-Alamance Regional Airport and the hurricane-ravaged counties of western North Carolina? Did dictates from federal authorities scuttle these flights or has the constant flow of supplies created backlogs at the receiving end?
ANSWER: It wasn’t some sinister official in Washington who grounded the relief flights from Burlington. Nor was it the doing of some frazzled desk clerk who had run out of storage space for the continuous shipments of canned soup and baby wipes from Alamance County.
In fact, the real reason why the supply convoys came to a halt on Monday was something much more mundane, according to Brian Fredrickson of Fredrickson Aviation.
“We ran it for five days,” Fredrickson recalled in an interview Tuesday, “and we’ve basically shut it down because our volunteers were tired and our pilots were tired.”
By the time the relief flights were put on pause, Fredrickson and his fellow volunteers had repeatedly flown to western North Carolina to deliver hundreds of tons of supplies to the victims of Hurricane Helene. These airlifts were, moreover, part of a surprisingly sophisticated distribution network that seems to have sprung from the very bedrock with the speed of a gale-force wind.
Fredrickson’s own role in this operation was something of an anomaly since his own aviation outfit is normally based in Person County. Fredrickson recalled that a resurfacing project at his hometown airport had forced his business to temporarily relocate to the Burlington-Alamance Airport prior to Helene’s arrival. Yet, though he was something of a displaced person himself, Fredrickson saw an opportunity join forces with others in Alamance County to bring some comfort, and shipments of relief supplies, to people in western North Carolina.
Fredrickson went on to organize a series of relief flights in tandem with Greg Moore of SkySouth Aviation, which operates the airport on behalf of the publicly-owned Burlington-Alamance Airport Authority. According to Dan Danieley, the executive director of the airport authority, this venture also received substantial support from the civil air patrol wing headquartered in Burlington. Also on board for this operation were volunteers with peripheral connections to aviation like Holly Farmer, a public school teacher from Mebane whose husband Chris works as a pilot for American Airlines.
“We’ve always been pretty close to aviation industry,” Farmer recalled in an interview Tuesday. “And when I saw that the Statesville airport was doing an airlift [for the victims of Hurricane Helene], I participated in it, and once I saw how amazing it was I got in touch with the aviation community here.”
Farmer went on to serve as a coordinator of the ad hoc logistics operation that came together at the Burlington-Alamance Airport. Her duties, by her own account, included tracking and dispatching flights, recruiting pilots, and loading planes with supplies. But Farmer insists that her contributions were matched by those of the other volunteers who joined this impromptu endeavor.
“This is the most beautifully organized grassroots campaign I’ve ever seen,” she went on to effuse. “It was a rather motley crew of professionals, trade workers, and aviation enthusiasts. But it was great to see people who, five days before, didn’t know each other from Adam exchanging phone numbers and making connections.”
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Over the course of its five-day lifespan, this ragtag operation spirited an untold amount of cargo to various locations in western North Carolina. These supplies were not only flown in on small aircraft but were also trucked up en masse as the roads in that part of the state began to reopen.
On Sunday alone, the Burlington-based operation logged 20 sorties and two semitruck deliveries that, cumulatively, bore 80,000 pounds of supplies to the hurricane’s victims. Fredrickson later recounted the sheer scale of that day’s achievement when he summed up his impressions in a post-op social media post.
“Tonight, we had ended it with the biggest pickup we had for the last five days,” he recalled on Facebook Sunday evening. “We had a Pilatus PC-12 come in and fly out a total of 1,700 lbs of supplies.”
The labors of Fredrickson and his associates have been warmly received by the folks who survived Helene’s assault. The expressions of gratitude have come from as far as Mountain City, Tennessee, where Dave Garris, the manager of the Johnson County Airport, has gladly accepted several deliveries from Burlington, North Carolina.
“Our roads were cut off for a couple of days,” Garris recalled in a phone conversation on Wednesday, “They were able to fly in supplies, and it helped save our community. The food they brought in fed 500 people in our town.”
Fredrickson acknowledged that he and his fellow volunteers were pretty much drained after five straight days of exertion. He nevertheless told The Alamance News that the airlift’s organizers agreed to snap back into action as they continued receiving requests for supplies from the disaster zone.
“We had hoped to shut down on Sunday,” he conceded. “But yesterday, we got a call from a couple of the airports that we had been flying into, and they told us about some specific items they needed.”
Fredrickson added that these residual needs prompted him and his colleagues to resurrect the airlift on Wednesday.
That morning, a platoon of volunteers returned to the hangar where the relief supplies have been warehoused, and they began boxing up items for transport that ranged from pet food and can openers to children’s books. Of particular emphasis for these shipments were things like sleeping bags, warm socks, and “life straws” – or personal water filters that are about the size of pipettes.
Meanwhile, Fredrickson said that he and the airlift’s other participants will continue to watch the developments in western North Carolina to see if any additional relief is in order. He acknowledged, however, that any follow-up missions will probably pale in comparison to the heady five-day campaign that had galvanized the Burlington-Alamance Airport last week.
“If we get some kind of emergency request, we can fire up a small group of folks very quickly,” he said. “But it’s more like we’re putting out small fires than mobilizing a full-blown operation.”
