By Richard L. Gaw
Staff Writer

On its website, there is a slogan included that is very apropos of what the New Garden Flying Field has become to the pilots and the communities it serves: Not just an airport…a destination. 

For three days last week, however, the destination was not New Garden Township but North Carolina, the site of extreme devastation after Hurricane Helene swept through the City of Asheville, ravaging the area in the wake of a storm that had already touched down in Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, Virginia and Tennessee and to date has left 227 dead.

Last Sunday, as Flying Field General Manager Jon Martin watched the horror unfold on his television screen, he immediately sent a post out asking for donations of household items, infant supplies and food that would be delivered from the Flying Field to the Hurricane Helene relief effort near Asheville.

By the following day – Sept. 30 – the staff at the Flying Field arrived at the airport in Toughkenamon to find residents from neighboring communities dropping off donations, and soon, the entire aviation center was filled to capacity. Over the course of the next few days, the amount of donations doubled and tripled to the point where the main hangar at the airport became a storage facility patrolled by airport staff and volunteers, including 24 members of the boy’s hockey teams at Upland Country Day School, who sorted donated items according to category and packaged up supplies for the flight relief.

On Oct. 1, Martin organized a pilots’ meeting to coordinate how the airport would begin to transport the donated supplies.

“We began to look at ways to help the effort and put a team of aviators together who would want to assist in the effort to fly down to North Carolina,” Martin said. “Asheville Airport would have been the ideal airport to fly into given that it was in the center of the devastation. However, they were using that airport for search and rescue, and there was no electricity, no fuel available and services were limited, so the last thing I wanted to do was fly a team of pilots into an already congested airspace.”

On Oct. 2, under the guidance of Martin and staffers Tami Gagnon, Nicholas Hunter, Connor Stewart and longtime Flight School Director Court Dunn, the first flight was filled with 800 pounds of supplies and took off from New Garden Flying Field, piloted by Steve Settlemyre and destined for the Raleigh Executive Airport, southwest of Raleigh-Durham, N.C. When each of the pilots landed, they were met by representatives from Elite Destination Services who are spearheading efforts to get supplies directly to the communities hardest hit during the hurricane.

It was called Operation November 57-NC -- a three-day effort that involved 21 pilots -- 

and when the last plane landed back in New Garden on Oct. 4, the relief effort had delivered 22,000 pounds – 11 tons -- of supplies.

New Garden Township Supervisor Steve Allaband said that the effort involved transporting back crated animals who were caught in the storm, who will then be transported to a rescue shelter in New Jersey. 

“This was just an idea that began last weekend that Jon brought to us and the pieces have slowly begun to come into place,” Allaband said. “I am amazed at how the community has pulled together. The people park their car, walk into the airport and ask us, ‘How can we help? What else do need?’”

“Once Jon put the message out there, entire groups of people went out to their local Walmart and dropped off supplies,” Dunn said. “All they needed was someone to say, ‘Let’s do this,’ and then they all came out of the woodwork to provide help. Jon has always had a vision about what he wants the airport to become in terms of its relationship to the community. He sees this unbelievable scenario out in front of him and he works his tail end off to make it happen, and he surrounds himself with good people.”

“The level of effort on behalf of our pilots and volunteers was incredible in such a short period of time,” Martin said. “I think what we proved last week was the power of the community that we live in. Not only did they make thousands of pounds of donations, they also contributed thousands of dollars for fuel reimbursements that enabled the pilots to get down to North Carolina. It also demonstrated the strength of a local airport to have this asset in New Garden Township and be able to support communities in another state.”

For two dozen young volunteers, their experience stacking boxes of supplies proved to be a valuable life lesson. 

“These efforts by our boy’s hockey team ties into our Living Kindness program, a service-learning program that was started a few years back at Upland with the help of Nancy Pia Foundation,” said Liam Gallagher, head of school at Upland Country Day School, who oversaw the team’s volunteerism on Oct. 1. “Upland has a long-standing tradition of service in the community and more recently, we have been trying to build more intentional opportunities and this one sort of came to us at the last minute.

“Upland’s four founding pillars of education are arts, academics, athletics and attitude, and part of that attitude piece is encouraging young people to develop a strong sense of character. Service-learning has a lot to do with that and so when we talk about service-learning, we talk about empathy and perspective. In this particular opportunity, the ability for our young boys on the hockey team to gain some perspective on what others are going through is really powerful.”

To contact Staff Writer Richard L. Gaw, email [email protected].