Page 14 - March 2015 Volume 19 Number 3

Taking Poppy Ho By Kevin Ware
If you’ve owned a twin or turbine aircraft for some time, it’s easy to take their transportation convenience and flexibility for granted. But when you have a flight or passenger experience that makes it all new again, you find that the mission itself is more rewarding than the flying.
Jeff H. and I were at Clay Lacy Aviation on Boeing Field (BFI) in the Lear 40, for our first passenger pick-up of the day. Her name was Poppy, and it was her big eyes, long eyelashes, light-green glasses, coy smile, and colorful knitted hat with protruding tussled hair that caught my attention. She was obviously all girl and definitely seemed to know it, sitting in the FBO passenger lounge next to her mother Christi and shyly beaming at all who walked by. Looking at the cute little tyke’s trusting and happy face, you would never have guessed that in her short two years of life she had already made dozens of trips to Seattle Children’s hospital, undergone a complete heart transplant, required tube feeding, and had shunts installed from head to chest to prevent hydrocephalus.
Seattle Children’s is a 250-bed hospital with over 650 doctors, devoted entirely to the care of children with conditions that would otherwise often prove fatal. The hospital provides this kind of care for Washington, Idaho, Montana, and parts of Oregon, and has nearby temporary living facilities
• • • •TWIN & TURBINE
for out-of-state families. This is very convenient, but they first need to get there, and then home again. Particularly in the winter, there can be real surface-transportation problems in moving children with serious medical conditions across multiple snowy mountain passes to Seattle, and even in the summer the driving time is sometimes just not feasible. If an immediate, life- threatening emergency exists, the patient’s home hospital or emergency room can arrange for air ambulance services, which are normally paid for by insurance. But, for frequently- required non-emergency visits, the parents usually have to figure it out on their own.
This is where Angel Flight West steps into the picture. AFW is an organization of pilots and aircraft owners who volunteer their services to provide free transportation in general aviation and business aircraft for patients like Poppy. Very much to the company’s credit, Alaska Airlines also partners with AFW in providing this service for free, which is extremely helpful. But, that still leaves parents trying to get through the inherently- hostile environment of TSA conga lines and frightening body-search machines at huge, impersonal Part- 121 airports. By using airports like Boeing Field and FBOs like Clay Lacy, AFW volunteers bypass all this unpleasantness, and are frequently able to deliver the patient to an airport much closer to home. Jeff and
I have been participating members for over a decade, and often it is the most-rewarding flying we do. Our job today is to take Poppy home.
Poppy and her family live in the country, out in the middle of Montana; Bozeman (BZN) is the nearest IFR-capable airport. Our flight planning from BFI to BZN on this particular day is relatively easy. There is a high-pressure system over central British Columbia, slowly moving southward, causing our entire three-state region to be cold and CAVU. Winds aloft are from the west at 100 knots in the low-40 flight levels. The distance from BFI to BZN is 482 nm, which will give the 450-knot Lear a ground speed of about 550 knots at altitude, making it a 55-minute trip. Air traffic is relatively light in this part of the U.S. and, if requested, the assigned routing is usually direct.
But we still need to decide what altitude to file for and that is not as simple. There is a rule of thumb for high-performance turbine aircraft that says, ‘climb 10,000 feet for every 10 minutes of horizontal flight’. For this trip, that rule will put us at the Lear’s maximum operating altitude of FL450. But, the airplane actually slows down a bit at that altitude, and the winds aloft start to taper off to 80 or so. Given these factors, we pick FL 430 as a reasonable compromise. However, there is more to consider.
When transporting sick children in particular, careful thought must
MARCH 2015