Volunteer pilots do rescues and drop off donations after Helene

ASHEVILLE, NC – It’s been one year since Helene devastated parts of the region in Western North Carolina and some of the first eyes-in-the-sky are reflecting on the devastation that followed. 

Without cell service and washed-out roads, hundreds of people were left stranded in the mountains. 

Al Mattress, a helicopter pilot with a commercial flight company, Total Flight Solutions, said he received an early morning call from one of the company’s clients. The client asked them to check on a family member in western North Carolina. 

Mattress says he got up in the air as quickly as he could. He was one of the first to see what was actually going on in the region.

“Watching it unfold, ya know, this water was still rising,” Mattress tells FOX. “I had gotten there personally, literally, right after the storm left.”

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Mattress did a couple missions checking on loved ones and realized the destruction was worse than anyone thought. Back on the ground was Total Flight Solutions helicopter pilot, Tim Grant. Grant laid out the logistics for dozens of pilots in the coming weeks as missions switched from rescues to donation drops. 

With support from the United Cajun Navy, Grant says they brought in nearly every helicopter they could. Everyone donated their time, effort and resources to immediately rescue people, or drop off essentials like medicine. 

Mattress talked to FOX about the reactions and conversations he had with some of the people he rescued.

“No phones, ya know the phone they have, it’s till the battery goes dead. They don’t know. They can’t call, they don’t know anybody is coming for them.”

“When they [the pilots] would get done with their mission, they would climb high enough to find a cell phone tower that was outside, make a radio call and say, ‘hey, this is where I am, I picked up these people, and they’re OK,’” says Grant.

Grant’s team of volunteer pilots did 25 rescues the first day and 30 the second day after Helene. “But we did well over 100 missions, just dropping off food and supplies,” he says. 

Volunteer pilots were working from sunup to sundown. Grant says pilots would debrief at the end of the day for about an hour before they called it a night. 

One story stood out to Grant the most: “He [a pilot doing a rescue] went to go pick up some people, and he could see arms sticking out from the mudslides that had gone over.”

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Also doing missions, but just dropping off supplies — was South Carolinian, Austin Lane. He heard about a group on Facebook, Carolina Aviators Network, putting together a group of pilot volunteers to get donations closer to the mountains. 

Lane flies a 1960s Baron twin-engine plane with a 1,000-pound load capacity, allowing him to fly a little further than other planes volunteering. 

“Delivered diapers for people with newborn babies or delivered canned goods or dietary restrictions and insulin,” Lane says. 

Looking back, Lane is amazed at the organization of the donation sites he landed on. He says it only took minutes for volunteers at local airports to load his plane with supplies. 

“It was one of the very few that could get further out. So we were doing 6 to 8 trips a day,” he says. 

Grant reflects on the overall experience, “The people that donated their supplies, their people, their helicopters, whatever it was…that was the best part.”

Roads began to clear with help from the North Carolina National Guard and other volunteers. This allowed more volunteers and nonprofit organizations to get further into the hardest hit regions. 

The NCNG tells FOX there were 869 air rescues, with 165 of them being complex hoist rescues. In an email to FOX, “A complex hoist rescue is when a helicopter crew uses a hoist to lift people from dangerous or hard-to-reach places during a disaster or emergency, and the situation is harder than a normal rescue.”

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Overall, the NCNG says South Carolina, Maryland, Oklahoma, Georgia, Florida, Connecticut, Minnesota, Iowa, New York, and Pennsylvania provided aircraft. The Army Helicopters used 21 CH-47 Chinooks, 7 UH-60 Blackhawks, 4 UH-72 Lakotas for a total of 32 helicopters.

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The NCNG also rescued 226 pets, dropped off 3,638 food pallets and brought in 1,877 tons of cargo by air.