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Transcript: Joe DeMarco, pilot and founder
Well, the routine depends on a departure time. Sometimes, we have 6 a.m. departures, so that means I’ve got to get up at 4 a.m. I get up, get to the airport, you know, file a flight plan, you know, pre-flight the plane. Today was an 8 o’clock departure, so this wasn’t too bad. And then [with] the transplants, you never know when that’s going to go, so pretty much our schedule is different every day.
I was a mason contractor and I used to do a lot of big jobs for Target stores — Walmart and supermarkets. My life was all about work and building things. I started flying when I was young, like when I was 20 years old. I flew up until I got married. It was just a hobby, just a little Cessna. And after the little Cessna, the four-seat Cessna, I had an ultralight plane, which is just a hang-glider with an engine on it, so I know my family and my wife and everybody [were] pretty happy when I sold that. It was kind of crazy, but it was so much fun! ‘Cause you look at this thing and everybody thought I just had to either do drugs or do something to go up on this thing ‘cause it was just like a kite with an engine on it!
Yeah, I came out; I had a call about doing a flight, and I didn’t really understand the details. Nobody told me that this little boy was born with cancer — he had a tumor. I had another pilot with me, and we walked into the airport, and this little guy was two years old and he had a winter hat on, and I didn’t realize he had no hair. The mother immediately broke down and she explained that he was born with a tumor and at two years old, the cancer was on his spine. They were hugging us and they thanked us all the way from New York City to Erie, Pennsylvania, where they live.
So from that moment on, it gave [me] a purpose to go somewhere. So now being a volunteer pilot, and we’re taking, like today, these two patients into New York here to a place where they can get better and we’re giving them a chance.
Well, a lot of the time, [the patient’s] condition prohibits them from flying commercially. So their other option, if it’s not us, is to hire someone, and it’s very, very expensive. Just like the trip we did today is between $16,000 and $18,000, and that’s only one-way!
Sometimes there [are] people that need transplants. We do a lot of transplant missions. People don’t understand that here in the United States if you need a transplant... Like say in Buffalo: You live in Buffalo and Boston, you want to get on the list there; typically they’ll want you to move to Boston, move to Cleveland, move to Pittsburgh, or wherever that organ’s going to be, because when that organ’s available, the window is very [small]. So we’re taking people when they’re told nothing can be done for them.