Air Serv pilot Bill Kelsey helps unload cargo with the aid of a local youth as U.N. workers look on in Iriba, Chad. Rick Mercier Visit the Photo Place

Aid from the air

Warrenton-based Air Serv International provides critical assistance in region with no transportation infrastructure

By RICK MERCIER

Date published: 10/26/2004

It wasn't the kind of situation an American pilot often encounters.

Taxiing down a dirt airstrip near the Chad-Sudan border, Bill Kelsey found himself nearly face to face with a camel.

At first, it looked like the beast wasn't going to budge. But after a brief standoff, the camel wisely made way for the King Air 200, deciding not to run the risk of getting sliced and diced by the plane's propellers.

"We had a moment. We made eye contact," Kelsey recalled back in the office in N'Djamena, the capital of Chad, later in the day.

Although camels may be the preferred means of covering long distances for those who live on eastern Chad's dry, dusty plains, the dromedaries aren't the best mode of transportation for foreign aid workers who must crisscross hundreds of miles to reach the 200,000 refugees along the border.

That's where Kelsey and Air Serv International enter the picture. In a country where paved roads are nonexistent outside the capital, the Warrenton-based nonprofit group provides critical air transport to United Nations staff and other humanitarian workers assisting needy refugees.

As villagers fleeing violence in the Darfur region of Sudan started pouring across the border last year, aid officials realized they faced a daunting mission.

"The difficulty here is the absolute total lack of infrastructure [and] the isolation of the place," Eduardo Cue, a spokesman for the U.N.'s refugee agency, said at an outpost in eastern Chad.

Air Serv President and CEO Stu Willcuts traveled to Chad in January and met with U.N. and Chadian officials to discuss the response to the exodus from Darfur. "It was obvious they needed help," he said.

Air Serv, which now has three planes in Chad flying under U.N. auspices, is supplying some of that much-needed help.

Its aircraft don't have the capacity to do things such as food drops. Instead, the group's fleet of small planes ferries around aid workers and delivers items such as vaccines, medicine and technical equipment.

"We fly high-value cargo and the people who run the programs," such as doctors and water-sanitation engineers, Willcuts said.

Air Serv also does emergency medical evacuations. Last month, after several aid workers were attacked by Chadian locals during a dispute in a refugee camp, Kelsey flew them out so they could receive appropriate medical attention.

Medevac services also are available to refugees.

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Date published: 10/26/2004