Georgia Puppy Caravan - August 21-23rd

Ted

Ted

The pilot formerly known as Twin Engine Ted
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Animal Rescue Flights (ARF), the organization I work with to transport a number of animals, is teaming up with several other organizations to host the Georgia Puppy Caravan. This will take place August 19-23 (for pilots the main days will be August 22-23). Dogs are getting transported from Atlanta, Georgia, up to Lindenwold, New Jersey. We've got an aggressive goal of emptying the Chattooga shelter down there entirely.

Anyone who's interested in participating, check out www.animalrescueflights.org for more information.

If you can't participate but want to help, we are looking for monetary donations in two places. One is to a food fund (see the website). Also, I am planning on flying the Aztec down and am looking for support (yes, I'm following all applicable FARs). Click the "Donate" button in my signature to make a donation and help! Unfortunately, my non-profit hasn't yet received 501(c)3 exemption status from the IRS yet, so donations are not tax deductible.

EDIT: Ok, I'm trying to add a button, but now have broken my signature beyond believe and require Jesse's help. In the mean time, the following link will take you to the donate page:

https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=6693913
 
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I have no idea how I broke PoA so badly, but Jesse has fixed the problem. Now I have the donate button in my signature, and it works.

Adam, I will see if I can get a list of the dogs.
 
Sounds like a worthy goal...but I have to ask, what about the kittens? :(
 
If you look at the prices, it ends up being far more economical to fly them with volunteers. Plus, the organizations that they are being transported from and to can't afford to do this kind of transport themselves. Plus, Grant makes a point about service (although I don't doubt that the commercial pet carriers offer good service).

We don't discriminate as far as animals that get transported. It just so happens that it most of the time is dogs. We have transported several cats on various occasions, but we don't get as many requests for those.
 
I'd forgotten about Adam's question for a bit, so getting back to it:

Right now there isn't a list generated of the animals being transported. We're in the process of arranging which animals are being transported where, and of course there is the hoped-for possibility that some will get adopted over the next 5 weeks. It won't be until the final week before that we'll really know what's getting transported. Behind the scenes there's a lot of work coordinating the various shelters receiving these dogs together, as well as raising the $12,000 for food to donate to shelters down there. More info is available at www.animalrescueflights.org

The ARFTruck (my Aztec) is slated to transport somewhere in the 10-15 dog range, depending on dog size. I still need to raise the fuel money for this as well - no donations so far.
 
Ted DuPuis said:
The ARFTruck (my Aztec) is slated to transport somewhere in the 10-15 dog range, depending on dog size. I still need to raise the fuel money for this as well - no donations so far.
Click to expand...

Fixed that for ya,.. might only get you 6 or so gallons, but at least you can get the props turning on that! :blueplane:
 
Thank you, Rob! Every bit helps. :)
 
Excellent news! The IRS has approved my 501(c)3 status, so my non-profit, Cloud Nine Rescue Flights, is now officially a tax-exempt non-profit organization. How often do you look forward to getting a letter from the IRS? :D

Better still, this is retroactive, so those who were kind enough to donate already will receive a letter that they can count as a tax deduction for the year.

We still need more donations, though. There are always more missions to fulfill. I've been averaging about once of these large missions per month, and am also getting into doing Angel Flights. I'll make another post with more details.
 
We're now a week away from this trip, and still need to raise more money for fuel. At this point, we've got roughly $800 of the estimated $1200 in required fuel costs. This covers travel to Atlanta, bringing the dogs up to their new shelter (likely around Orange County, NY) and returning home.

As a reminder, all donations are tax deductible! Any extra money from this trip will go towards the next trip.
 
As a reminder, the puppy caravan is this Friday/Saturday. We'll be arriving on Friday about 3 PM, leaving Saturday. Anyone in the Atlanta area who wants to join is more than welcome!

Grant, thank you for your donation! We've about met our goal at this point, although still a bit short.
 
I will try to get out to the airport tomorrow afternoon. what time are you all leaving on Saturday?
 
We'll be planning on being wheels up likely around 9 AM on Saturday, if you come by the airport around 8 AM or so (KPDK) we should be starting to load the dogs. I'll be there in the Aztec.

We're planning for wheels up by 7 or 7:30 AM tomorrow, having to stop in Pittsburgh and Virginia on the way down. Should be an interesting trip.
 
And back home now! The whole event was a success. I left Williamsport Friday morning in the Aztec, taking off into overcast at Williamsport, and flying in and out of IMC towards AGC for my first stop. Checking the NOTAMs for AGC, I saw that 10/28 were closed and the ILS10 and ILS28 were closed. Just my luck. So I shot the GPS28 circle to land 31. The approach ended up being right down to mins, and the most interesting approach I've done to date.

I picked up another ARF pilot and then headed down towards Georgia, after loading the some 600 lbs of dog food that we were bringing with us. The flight down to Georgia was uneventful, other than having instrument conditions. Once we got down to Georgia, we were rewarded for our efforts with a scattered layer of clouds and no thunderstorms. We met up with another ARF pilot, my friend who has a Travel Air, and we filled up on cheap gas, then did a formation flight over 15 miles for lunch. We picked a staging airport that had cheap fuel and instrument approaches, but no courtesy car and no food. Go figure.

While we were eating lunch, we decided we'd do a formation flight for the hop over to the destination airport (KPDK), and do a formation low pass for the crowd and media that were there. After a good briefing on how we were going to do it, we took off. I was the leader, and from takeoff to landing my friend followed doing a great job of it. We got some great pictures, and in formation did a low pass of the airport, followed by an Oshkosh style landing and taxi up to the FBO.

At the FBO, there was a large crowd including several media representatives and local political figures. We had quite a greeting, which did make the local news in Atlanta. See a few videos taken:

Flight of two low approach (yes, tower approved it): http://www.youtube.com/user/Gumboz1953#play/uploads/6/CN_WsES-ovM

Arrival at the FBO (still as a flight of two): http://www.youtube.com/user/Gumboz1953#play/uploads/5/Xg1ZiTarBkg

After spending a few hours with that, we went back to the hotel for a quick shower before the evening's event. Back in February I did a flight for a documentary of animal rescue group called Rescue Ink (see http://www.rescueink.org/). National Geographic is starting a series on them called Rescue Ink Unleashed (see the trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gMeL_fg3rQ), and that evening was the premiere of the first episode. Unfortunately it didn't have the flight that we did for them, but hopefully that will make one of the episodes.

Saturday morning we woke up and headed to the airport for the real part of the whole trip, transporting more animals. My passengers were all heading to New Hampshire and Maine, so I was to head to Manchester, NH with my crew of 8 dogs, 2 cats, and 3 humans (including me). Aside from my copilot, we also had a camera man who was documenting the whole thing. I ended up filing non-stop to Manchester, looking at the winds aloft forecast and weather. Unfortunately, conditions got worse and winds weren't as good as forecast. I had to drop my AGC pickup back off in AGC at some point anyway, so we decided to just divert there to drop him off. That gave us a good opportunity to wash out the dog cages.

Then heading on over to Manchester, we got better tailwinds and were seeing 185 kt ground speeds for most of the trip. The weather was getting interesting closer to Manchester with rapidly changing conditions, and so I put the radar, eye-dar, and 496 to work for dodging some cells, making what ended up being a visual approach into Manchester. We unloaded the dogs, and looked at the radar on the weather station, observing worsening conditions. AdamB had come to help unload, so we got dinner and then checked the conditions again, and they'd gotten worse. Adam offered me a bed for the night, which I was glad to accept and decided to fly home this morning when the weather was more agreeable.

This morning after getting breakfast, I hopped back in the Aztec for my last flight of the weekend back to Williamsport, shooting an easy ILS in.

Overall, this weekend everyone involved delivered close to 50,000 lbs of dog food (including a semi truck filled with it) to Atlanta shelters to keep them going. We also transported 200 animals, completely emptying a shelter down there. While this was certainly the largest event we've done, this is the sort of thing we do regularly. Now for the fun of doing some retroactive fund raising for this event, and moving forward for the next one.
 
Awesome work! Once things settle for the wife and I, I KNOW she would love to do something like this.
 
Ted, great work as always. Good to see you again and glad things worked out and I could help out. Any time you're stranded in the area you're always welcome!
 
Sorry I missed you. I hope my coworkers at Epps took good care of you. Great to hear that so many dogs found new homes.:thumbsup:
 
Epps did a great job and took excellent care of us. The fact that they let us take over their ramp for the afternoon was plenty good of a welcome. :)
 
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