It's been a while, I know. But I had a very interesting flight on Thursday, January 26, and wanted to share what an abnormal day is for an MFI pilot.
It started out as all flight days do - at 5am. A little coffee and off to the airport by 5:15am. I arrive at the hangar 30 minutes later and waiting to load on the plane are 62,440 little baby live fish. That is right, baby live fish in bags in boxes. Accompanying the fish is the president of Operation Blessing, Bill Horan.
So what kind of fish are worth flying into Haiti, you are thinking? Gambusia, tilapia, and surprisingly, tropical fish. Gambusia eat mosquitoes - therefore reducing mosquitoes and malaria. Tilapia are for eating. This trip we took down half breeding Tilapia and half just for eating. The rest of the fish were tropical fish. The intention for them is to raise them to sell for aquariums. I'm not sure if the purpose will be to ship them back to the States or to sell them to Haitians.
Operation Blessing has a place near Port au Prince where they breed the fish. I don't really know much more than that. I do know that boxes of fish and water aren't that light.
So that's the fish - what about the dogs, If you look in the picture above, you'll see a German Shepard on the ground in hte bottom right. That's not so unusual - we take dogs down all the time. The unusual part about this trip is that we took down two dogs in crates strapped on top of each other. That I had not done before. The plane was so packed that this was the best we could do.
And then there are always the people. So we flew from Fort Pierce to Exuma, Bahamas and then on to Port au Prince. There we unloaded all the fish and few thousand more pounds of baggage. We then loaded back on to the plane a little over a thousand pounds of Samaritan's Purse supplies. They have shut down their helicopter program in Haiti and we brought back tools and stands and ladders and anything else associated with that program - except the helicopter.
We then flew on to Barahona, Domincan Republic to offload another 1500 lbs. Then back to Haiti, Cap Haitien this time, to pick up 13 passengers to bring home.
And that was our abnormal day.
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