Photo above: Sean Rayford/Getty Images Operation Helo: Changing the Course of Disaster Response Volunteers who brought relief to North Carolina after Hurricane Helene to form ongoing helicopter disaster relief organization. By Mark Huber Storms spawned by Hurricane Helene decimated mountainous Western North Carolina on Friday, Sep. 27, 2024. Torrential rain dumped almost 3 ft. of water within 72 hours over parts of the area, sending rivers well over their banks. The event destroyed 126,000 homes, generated 1,400 landslides, wiped out 6,000 miles of roads and more than 1,000 bridges and culverts, and downed power and communications grids as well as 160 water and sewer systems. More than 100 North Carolina residents died, and at least one dozen are still unaccounted for. Initial damage estimates top $60 billion. Thirty-nine of the state’s 100 counties were designated as federal disaster areas. With communications down and the roads out, the scope of the disaster took days to comprehend. But informal communication—some of it over social media—between private helicopter pilots and volunteers within the region quickly painted a dire picture. It prompted them, on an ad hoc basis, to stand up one of the largest private air forces in the history of the United States within two days, long before official help became available. Over the next 11 days, more than 100 privately owned helicopters from as far away as Wyoming descended on the small airport in Hickory, North Carolina (KHKY). There, they set up a command center, field hospital, and relief-supply collection and distribution hub. In a matter of days, Operation Helo (for “Humanitarian Emergency Logistics Organization”) accomplished the near impossible. It flew 4,000 incident-free missions within a 5,273-sq.-mi. area, fielding 2,125 calls for help, setting up 167 helicopter landing zones, performing 450 evacuations, and delivering 523 Starlink satellite communications systems and more than 2 million lb. of much-needed water, food, medical, and other supplies to survivors otherwise cut off from the rest of the world. The highly successful operation has produced a permanent, nationwide organization of volunteer helicopter pilots, owners, and others that will be formally announced at VERTICON 2025. At the group’s core are the individual members of the nation’s civil rotorcraft community who recognize the unique capabilities of their aircraft to provide lifesaving aid when nothing else can. Calls for Help Marty Fisher served as a presidential helicopter pilot for Marine Helicopter Squadron One (HMX-1) and is now the aviation director for Atrium Health in Charlotte, North Carolina. Atrium flies a fleet of Airbus helicopters and Pilatus PC-24 jets. Two days before Helene hit, the US Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) contacted Fisher to place one of the PC-24s on its emergency response plan for the storm. After the hurricane passed, however, FEMA wasn’t being contacted for help because communications were down—so the jet sat in the hangar. Atrium’s activities in Western North Carolina are limited, and Fisher didn’t hear much from the region until he received a text Saturday night, Sep. 28, from a helicopter operator who had flown into the area to conduct a wellness check and who was requesting helicopter delivery of medical supplies. US Army National Guard Airbus UH-72B Lakota hovers over a community on Sep. 30, 2024, near Black Mountain, North Carolina, where the Swannanoa River, swollen from rain from Hurricane Helene, reached a flood stage of more than 27 ft. The severe flooding left residents without power, water, or accessible roads. (Sean Rayford/Getty Images) On Sunday morning, Fisher received another call for help from a different operator. The two calls convinced him that something very bad was happening in the mountains. Subsequent calls he received from volunteer fire departments, emergency medical services, and hospitals—many using satellite phones—confirmed it. Atrium dispatched two helicopters to Hickory, one with a full air ambulance interior and the other, fresh out of maintenance, with an empty interior that could be used for supply drops. Arriving at the Hickory helicopter air ambulance base, the crews found it without power and communications. Fortunately, things were better on the other side of the airport. And that was largely the work of Matt McSwain and, at first, a small team of volunteers that eventually grew to a force of 700. McSwain, a military veteran and helicopter pilot, owns a company that manufactures race car and bush airplane suspension components in Maiden, North Carolina. On Saturday morning, he received a call from a customer in Texas, Doug Jackson, who in 2017 formed the nonprofit fixed-wing aircraft charity Operation Airdrop. Jackson encouraged McSwain to investigate “things in the mountains.” McSwain took off from Little Mountain Airport (6NC1) in Maiden in his MD 500. He wasn’t prepared for the hellscape he found: washed out roads and bridges; virtual spaghetti bowls of downed, entangled power lines and uprooted, twisted trees; flattened buildings and outsized debris clogging the swollen waterways. “It was barbaric,” McSwain says. McSwain quickly ascertained that airports immediately near the worst of the storm were either too damaged or lacked the infrastructure to support large-scale helicopter operations. He landed at Hickory, about 40 miles away from the worst of the devastation, and asked the local FBO for a room. The FBO, unlike the air ambulance base across the field, still had power. He then called other helicopter operators in North Carolina, including the local Robinson dealer. By Sunday, Sep. 29, two days after the storm hit, the elements of an organization and a plan were in place. A damaged bridge in Bat Cave, North Carolina, bears a handwritten “Don’t Land” sign intended as a warning for relief helicopters. The dangers in areas rocked by natural disasters are not always obvious. (Mario Tama/Getty Images) Jackson, in Texas, headed up to Concord, North Carolina, with fixed-wing aircraft laden with supplies to set up operations. Compared with Hickory, Concord features a longer active runway and the airport is adjacent to a Walmart that was converted into a regional drop-off center for donated supplies for the storm’s survivors. Planes would either deliver the supplies to the helicopters in Hickory or the helicopters would fly to Concord for pickup and distribution. Email blasts and social media posts, largely on Facebook and Instagram, went out to area helicopter pilots. By early Sunday morning, 6 helicopters were on the ramp at Hickory. By Monday morning, there were 33. One of them, a Robinson R44 Raven II, belonged to retired NASCAR auto-racing team executive Andy Petree. On Saturday morning, Petree, who lives in Lake Norman, North Carolina, and his wife were in the middle of an eight-hour car trip to Port Canaveral, Florida, for a long-anticipated vacation cruise. Petree’s phone began “blowing up” with social media posts and phone calls from flying friends about the situation in the mountains. Then Petree started getting texts from individuals asking for direct assistance. “We have to help these people,” he told his wife. By Sunday, they’d canceled their cruise and were driving home. By Monday morning, he was flying missions out of Hickory, and by the end of the day, he’d been made chief pilot of rotorcraft operations for the relief effort. Dangerous Flying Petree says the flying was incredibly challenging: tight landing zones (LZs) peppered with fallen trees and power lines, all the variables and nuances of mountain flying, and washed-out and undermined roads with “SOS” carved into the roadside mud and “HELP” spray-painted on what little pavement remained by stranded survivors. The R44s were particularly suited to the task and accounted for about 80% of the aid delivered and evacuations, including a nursing home with 154 patients. “People couldn’t even walk out,” Petree recalls. “They had no food, water, or power for three days, and nobody even knew where they were.” The pilots and their crews had to heavily improvise. “Almost all these missions would turn into another,” Petree says. Delivery missions turned into evacuation missions. Petree personally evacuated a special-needs child. A distraught woman wanted help finding her husband who had been washed away. People who had lost everything still didn’t want to leave. The base at Hickory rerouted helicopters in flight. Flying days were long. At night, Petree changed his own oil after debriefing. He flew 70 hours in 12 days. Stress levels were high. “It’s not your standard flying,” Petree says. Pilots had to approach the tight LZs—too small for military helicopters—slowly, and pay close attention to loads, power management, squirrely winds in the gorges, and obstacles. You needed another set of eyes in the cockpit. Chris Zeitler was one of those spotters. A native North Carolinian and active-duty military member with special operations squad leader experience, Zeitler is also a fixed-wing student pilot, training with Total Flight Solutions in Louisburg, North Carolina. The fixed-wing and helicopter training center was sending helicopters to Hickory. Zeitler, off on a four-day pass—later extended— thought his experience would be useful and caught a ride in one of the R44s. “I didn’t know how bad things were until I got there,” he says. An Advanced Tactical Operation McSwain understood the value of Zeitler’s military experience and tapped him to head up tactical operations, setting up security at the airport and vetting volunteers, including those assigned to each pilot. His force grew to about 75, including 15 working security at the airport. The volunteers who flew with the pilots functioned as a combination of tactical flight officer, crew chief, aircraft loader, rescue swimmer, medic, and liaison/recon specialist. Zeitler focused on individuals with previous military, firefighting, air ambulance, or law enforcement experience. He also flew along as the tactical officer on several missions during the first three days of operations. He characterized the destruction he saw as “insane,” such as the tour bus that floated through a church in the community of Bat Cave. When a helicopter landed in a relief area, the tactical volunteer was responsible for identifying and engaging local leadership, generally the volunteer fire chief, and ascertaining the needs of each community, including critical medications. They coordinated critical actions such as road clearing, setting up helicopter landing zones, and marking them with VRM coordinates. They also delivered the donated Starlink systems, which allowed the local authorities to communicate with neighboring communities, further speeding relief efforts. Each helicopter that was sent out carried two days of sustainment supplies for the crew in the event they got stuck somewhere. Petree’s wife made him a bag of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. He gave most away to survivors he met on his flights. Help Flows In Back at base in Hickory, by Monday night, Sep. 30, McSwain knew he had some urgent problems. He personally had guaranteed to pay for the fuel of any helicopter that showed up. The tab for the first full day of flight operations was already $61,000. While people were showing up at the airport with fistfuls of cash, and the Rev. Franklin Graham, himself a pilot and the head of relief charity Samaritan’s Purse, had offered to help, McSwain needed a way to process the donations and turn them into charitable contributions—legally. With the help of an attorney and language gleaned from the artificial intelligence app ChatGPT, Operation Helo officially opened for business on Tuesday, Oct. 1—a mere four days after Hurricane Helene devastated the area—as a 501(c)(3) federally tax-exempt organization. It raised $4.1 million within days. Also on that Tuesday, the FAA arrived in Hickory to help. A helicopter lands on North Carolina State Route 74 in Bat Cave, North Carolina, on Oct. 3, 2024. Storm damage to roads and bridges from Hurricane Helene left the community inaccessible to auto traffic for a week. (Sean Rayford/Getty Images) Meanwhile, helicopters, supplies, and volunteers continued to pour in. Robinson Helicopter Co. sent parts kits. Mobile A&P maintenance technicians arrived to donate their services. Operation Helo took over the new FBO and the old terminal building with a museum and a restaurant. The restaurant, by virtue of its refrigeration equipment, became the pharmacy. A field hospital was established and handled a wide variety of injuries and even delivered a baby. An emergency operations center (EOC) fielded distress calls and dispatched missions. Calls came in via a dedicated phone line and through email and social media. A team created mission cards with as much information as possible—the physical address, coordinates, and any salient medical information. The cards were triaged based on urgency and coordinated with maps of the area. And, courtesy of the FAA, each mission was given a transponder code from an available pool of 40, drawn from a fishbowl like a lottery ticket. When a mission was completed, the code went back in the bowl. Pilots picked up a card and a code and headed for deactivated Runway 1/19 at Hickory that became a giant helicopter ramp, home to up to 60 at any given time. The runway hosted a true cornucopia of different rotorcraft types—from R44s to K-Maxes to Chinooks and everything in between. Altogether, 103 private helicopters participated in the effort over the course of two weeks. Tracking software displayed each flight on EOC computer screens in real time. Pilots followed dedicated in and out routes and attended daily morning and evening briefings. On Oct. 2, Ivanka Trump flew in on a Gulfstream jet packed with 300 Starlink systems donated by Elon Musk. The next day, two Massachusetts National Guard CH-47s arrived, officially to conduct “training missions.” Other military helicopters from several other states also appeared to do “training.” All received missions and codes from the EOC. “It was the craziest thing I’ve ever seen in my life,” says McSwain. “We were telling Black Hawks and Chinooks what to do and where to go.” Area military commanders were augmenting Zeitler’s force of tactical flight officers with “volunteers,” also ostensibly out on passes. McSwain leveraged his auto racing contacts to recruit some of the top Formula Drift drivers in the United States, who began arriving midweek. Operation Helo began working with them to start forging roads into the mountains, keeping them supplied with intelligence and air drops. On Thursday, Oct. 3, the FAA informed McSwain it was throwing up a 30-mile-wide national security temporary flight restriction (TFR) over the area to accommodate the visit of then–President Joe Biden. It would have shut down operations at Hickory for an entire day. McSwain objected and convinced the FAA to limit the TFR area to 10 miles. “We kept flying,” he says. And the donations kept coming. During the second week of Operation Helo, an Amazon executive in Charlotte called and wanted to know what was going on in Hickory—Amazon had 61,000 packages to deliver there, enough cold-weather clothes to fill four semi–tractor trailers and 29 box trucks. Operation Helo partnered with Charlotte’s Elevation Church to conduct one of the largest cold-weather clothing drives in the state’s history. As flight operations wound down, Operation Helo had burned through more than $800,000 worth of aviation fuel but still had money left. It spent it on purchasing and delivering 182 camper trailers to families who lost their homes in the disaster. A Template for the Future Months later, Zeitler reflected on his time in Hickory. “These are my neighbors, my brothers and sisters. They needed help and I felt compelled to go help them.” The experience has convinced Zeitler to get a helicopter add-on rating once his initial fixed-wing flight training is completed. “I’m definitely a big fan of rotary-wing now.” McSwain marvels at the volunteers who came to Hickory. “It was the craziest experience of my life. The talent pool that showed up to help us was insane.” They slept in their aircraft, on the FBO floor, in hangars, and in their cars. And they are ready to do it again. “It felt like we had done something meaningful,” says Petree. “If Operation Helo has any more missions like this, I’m going to be available.” He may get that chance. Working with the Robinson Helicopter Co., McSwain intends to make Operation Helo a permanent, nationwide organization. “We intend to be at every natural disaster that we can.” Robinson and Operation Helo are developing a training syllabus and course for volunteer relief pilots. “It’s going to change the way the country responds to disasters,” Robinson CEO David Smith tells VAI. The goal is to create “a network of prepared pilots who are ready for disasters.” Smith envisions in-person courses that teach flying into various types of disaster aftermath, including floods, mudslides, wildfires, and earthquakes. The training “is going to be an enjoyable experience. The next time the country, their neighbors, need their help, they will be better prepared. Once people do this, they are bonded like brothers.” Mark Huber is an aviation journalist with more than two decades of experience in the vertical flight industry.
