(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) - A life-changing or life-threatening illness puts a lot of stress on the patient and their families.

The time, money, and emotional toll can be unbearable, but there's a unique service based in Peoria that can help people better navigate these trying times.

Joined now by Lindsey Kerr, the Executive Director of LifeLine Pilots.

Good to see you.

- Thank you for having me.

- I'll tell you, this is a very cool organization that we may be telling people about this.

They may be hearing about it for the first time.

So your organization helps fly people from their homes to hospitals and back.

How did all this get started?

- Well, we started about 43 years ago actually.

So we are unfortunately a well-kept secret.

We don't want to be after 43 years, but we're getting the word out little by little and we appreciate you having me on today to share about it.

So we started 43 years ago in a garage over in Champaign.

A woman named Wanda started the organization.

She got her pilot's license in her forties.

She wanted to do something with that pilot's license.

And so she started flying people from their home in Champaign to Mayo Clinic for medical care.

And then she got her pilot friends involved and it's grown over the years.

And now here we are 43 years later and we're still helping people get to that non-emergency medical care far from home.

We've actually done the most flights we've ever done in the history of our organization this last year with almost a thousand flights.

- Wow.

That's awesome.

And the headquarters now is in Peoria.

- It is.

- And you serve 10 states, is that right?

- Yep.

We serve 10 states in the Midwest, basically Tennessee, on north to the Canadian border, from Iowa to Ohio, and all the states in between.

We have about 350 volunteer pilots and they're located throughout that 10 state region.

So we can fly people from the airport that's closest to home, to the airport that's closest to treatment.

- Give us an example.

I would assume a lot of people are flown maybe to the Mayo Clinic, maybe St. Jude in Memphis.

- Yep.

- Give us, just throw out an example of where someone might live, even if it's in a kind of a rural area and maybe they have to go to the big city.

- Yeah, so we have someone that we've flown from Canton, Illinois.

So really rural, very small airport.

The pilots go to Canton, pick them up at that small airport and then fly them to Cancer Treatment Center of America, which is now called City of Hope, actually in Zion, Illinois.

So just north of Chicago, kind of near the Wisconsin border.

And we can fly people no matter how many times they need to go, you know, even if it's once for that second opinion or once a month for cancer treatment.

So in this person's case, we've flown them multiple times back and forth for treatment.

- And tell us why, you know, the example you gave was someone in a rural area, but give us an example of someone who just may not be able to handle a car trip and and needs to get there quickly.

- Yeah, so there's multiple reasons why someone would use our service.

One might be that they can't sit in a car for an extended period of time, you know, that eight or 10 hour car ride might not be feasible for them.

Maybe they physically can't do it, maybe they can't drive themselves or they don't have a reliable car to get them there.

When I first started with LifeLine Pilots back five years ago, I went on one of the flights with a passenger.

They were from Pekin, and we flew outta Mount Holly Airport in Peoria and we flew to Rochester, Minnesota for them to go to Mayo Clinic.

And on the flight I was chatting with them about why they were traveling.

The woman had severe scoliosis, there was no treatment for her locally, but at Mayo Clinic they had a specialist who could hopefully help and they didn't have any reliable way to get there.

Their car would not make it, they could not afford the commercial flight to get there.

And they were resigned to the fact that she would not see that specialist.

And then a friend told 'em about LifeLine Pilots, they reached out, we were able to help and that was the first flight that I gotta go on with a passenger.

And it meant so much and we're up in the air.

And it was a beautiful day, it was about this time of year, beautiful day.

We saw the fall leaves flew over the Mississippi and we get there and she had looked terrified on the flight, even though it was so smooth.

And the pilot was very skilled.

She looked terrified and we landed and she came up to me and she had tears in her eyes and she just said she was so scared to be there because she was worried about what they were gonna tell her, that there wouldn't be hope.

But she was so grateful for our help because she was there to actually have the opportunity.

And it just meant so much to me.

It told me, you know what I had signed on for to work for LifeLine Pilots really made an impact on other people.

And the good news is, is they did have treatment for her.

They were able to help her.

So that's a good news story all around.

And you know, and we do that again and again for thousands of people.

- Well of course you couldn't do it without the pilots.

And do most of these pilots, are they flying their own planes?

- Yep, yep.

So pilots either own their own plane.

They rent an aircraft, or maybe they belong to a club where they have access to multiple planes that they can fly.

We have that here in Peoria with the Bradley Flying Club.

They own multiple aircraft and pilots, you know, join that club and they're able to fly those airplanes.

So our pilots pay for all the costs of the flight, the fuel, and any cost involved.

Last year they donated over $2 million in free flights.

- That's awesome.

I think about fuel, I don't even know what aircraft fuel costs or miles to the gallon an airplane might get.

- Yeah, it really depends on the airplane.

You know, the smaller the airplane, you know, the less it's going to cost to fly.

But on average, our pilots, the cost is about 2,800 to $3,200 per flight that they take for us is the cost that they incur.

- Wow.

- Now that's a tax deductible donation.

Just like if they were donating cash to our organization, they can claim that back on their taxes, tax deductible donations.

So that's great for them.

And we're able to, you know, have these amazing donors who are doing something that's meaningful to them as well.

- Sure.

I mean, they obviously love to fly and now they get to, - Yeah.

- Not only help people sight see, but help people get to their appointments.

What kind of an impact have you seen this have on the pilots?

- It has a huge impact.

We had a pilot not long ago tell us that they never felt like a real pilot until they flew for us.

'cause most of our pilots are not commercial pilots.

You know, they're not the ones flying the airlines, they're not the ones that are flying for FedEx or any of the big companies.

The corporations like Caterpillar, they're private pilots who just love to fly.

They wanna get up in the air.

And so we give them a way to do that and really help somebody in their time of need.

So they're able to kind of marry those two things together.

Their love of aviation and their need to help someone.

But yeah, this pilot told us that he never felt like a real pilot until he took a LifeLine Pilot's flight and it did more for him than it did for the people he was flying.

- That's great.

Now, in terms of flying a patient, what are some of the ground rules or basic rules that are followed?

I mean, is there anybody else allowed on board or does there have to be someone else, you know, kind of looking over the client?

- Yeah, so our passengers can fly on their own, but we also allow every passenger to take a caregiver or a companion with them.

These are non-emergency flights.

So usually people are not traveling with medical professionals.

If they have the requirement to do that, then that's something that they would have to work out with their own insurance company to bring someone on board.

But there's no medical personnel on the flights.

Often it's the pilot and the passenger and maybe one companion or caregiver on that plane.

So we do some background checks into people to make sure that it's safe for them to fly.

So we get a physician's release for every person who flies with us just to make sure that it's safe for them to fly in a small and pressurized aircraft.

These are small airplanes, you know, a lot of people think of a small airplane as that plane that you might take from Peoria to Chicago that seats, you know, 12 to 20 people.

- Yeah.

- But these are four seater aircraft.

Usually, they're very small.

You have the windows surrounding you.

So it's a beautiful view.

It's an amazing opportunity for someone to do something that maybe they haven't done before, but they are small airplanes.

So we wanna make sure that people can get in and out of them as well, because it can be a tight fit.

- Well, yeah, looking at some of your videos, a lot of the entrances are on the wings.

- Yep.

- So you have to be able to climb up on the wing and get in, and are there any other people with medical conditions that maybe this just wouldn't be good for or it just doesn't apply to?

- Yeah, so people do have to be ambulatory.

You know, they have to be able to get in and out of that airplane.

So if somebody is not mobile, if they're in a wheelchair and unable to help themselves to get into the airplane, we can provide some assistance.

But it's usually just the pilot and the companion who are there with the person.

Sometimes we do require that people take a companion if we know that they're gonna need some additional assistance while in the air, because the pilots flying the airplane, they're not able to provide that.

- No stewardess.

- There isn't.

- You will be looking at the back of the pilot's head.

- Yep, yep.

- Yeah.

- Or sitting next to the pilot, you know, there's some of our pilots will let the person sit in the front seat with them and you know, then you get a real great view.

- So let's say someone's flying from Peoria to the Mayo Clinic, once they get to the airport up there in Minnesota, are they on their own?

I mean, is it their responsibility to get to the appointment and back to the airplane?

- Yeah, it is.

So people have to be able to find their own ground transportation.

But a lot of these clinics that we're flying to, they have shuttles that go to the local airports.

And so we have all of that information that we provide people ahead of time.

We also provide them information about hospitality houses like Family House and Ronald McDonald House like we have here in Peoria.

But they have sister organizations throughout the country.

So we try to provide as many resources as we can for our passengers, even though we can't directly book that for them.

We can at least give them the resources and help out.

- We mentioned that you cover 10 states mostly in the Midwest area.

Are there other organizations like this around the country that do this too?

- That's a great question.

Yeah.

So we have sister organizations throughout the country.

We cover the 10 states and the Midwest.

But our sister organizations cover the rest of our all 50 states, even Alaska and Hawaii are actually covered by volunteer pilot organizations.

We can fly people anywhere from a hundred to a thousand miles.

So that a thousand miles means that if somebody is living here in central Illinois, and let's say they need to go to MD Anderson in Houston, Texas, because there's a lot of clinical trials going on there, we can fly them there.

And we do that by partnering with our sister organization that's located in that region.

So we work kind of like a relay race pilot.

Number one picks 'em up, they meet pilot number two, pilot number two flies 'em, they meet pilot number three and pilot number three flies 'em the rest of the way.

'cause those small airplanes, they're only going about 300 miles at a time.

So to get to that thousand miles that we could fly, it takes up to three flights to do that.

And my mission coordinators are coordinating all of that and putting all those puzzle pieces together and communicating with everybody along the way.

- So they really handle the logistics of the- - Yep.

- That is very cool.

- Yeah, our flight coordinators are logistical masters, let me tell you.

And they're great at working with the other organizations and the passengers and the pilots because our pilots are volunteers.

Let's not forget that.

- Yeah.

- So we're not calling them up and saying, Hey Mark, we have a flight on Friday, I'm gonna put you on it.

We call you up and we say, Hey Mark, we have a great opportunity for you to fly, you know, Mary, to treatment on Friday.

- And usually how far in advance are you trying to get the pilots?

- It really depends how quickly the passengers are getting us their dates that they need to travel.

Most people who fly with us are not just flying one time, they're flying multiple times.

So for that first flight, we need about five to seven working days in order to get them a flight.

That's because we have to get that physician's release.

We have to then find the pilots and get all the information that we need.

After that, you know, we can book the flight within a couple of days, but it's the more lead in time we have, the more opportunity we have to find pilots.

- Now with this 10 state area that you cover, I'm assuming if someone's flying outta Peoria, you're trying to get a Peoria area pilot.

- Yep.

- Does that always happen?

Or does sometimes you have to have someone from a different area fly to Peoria to fly someone out?

- You know, it really just depends on the flight.

So if we're taking a flight from Peoria to Zion, Illinois, that pilot might be from Peoria or they might be from Zion, or they might be from somewhere along that route.

We have this thing called a pilot efficiency.

So it's how efficient is the route for that pilot.

And so when we're trying to contact pilots, we wanna make sure it's a pretty efficient flight for 'em.

Planes are expensive to run, as we we just talked about.

- Yeah.

- So we wanna make sure that, you know, we can get them efficient routes.

But then we have some pilots who just absolutely love to fly and they're gonna take a flight, you know, whether it's efficient for them or not, because they have the day off, you know, or they have some availability.

- Good excuse to go somewhere new for 'em, I guess.

- Yeah, so pilots have this thing, they talk about a hundred dollars hamburger, it's probably not a hundred dollars anymore, it's more like a thousand dollars hamburger.

So they would get in their plane and they would fly somewhere just to fly.

And you know, then they'd spend, you know, their $20 on their hamburger.

But really that hamburger cost a lot more because of the cost of the running the airplane.

Well, we're a much better excuse to fly than a hundred dollars hamburger.

- There you go.

There you go.

Can you think of some examples of folks in central Illinois who maybe are, for lack of a better term, frequent flyers and you know, where they might go and why?

- Yeah.

So we have this kiddo Jackson who we flew last year.

We flew him every day for seven weeks.

This was before the Cancer treatment center here in Peoria opened, the OSF Comprehensive Cancer Center opened.

And he was needing to travel from Decatur to Chicago for the proton radiation beam.

And he needed treatment every single day for seven weeks for a brain tumor.

And we were able to fly him.

And it was amazing how our pilots answered that call.

When they first contacted us, we were like, we've never done anything like this before.

Flying every single day.

And our pilots, you know, we reached out and we had ones that were coming every week.

They were saying, okay, I'll take every Thursday, I'll take every Friday, you know, send me Jackson's dates and I'll do any of 'em that I can.

And what it meant for Jackson was he could go to school all day.

He took a late afternoon flight up to Chicago, had his treatment, then the pilot would wait for him, fly him back home, and he'd be home in time to have dinner with his family.

And for a kid he was 12 years old.

And for him to be able to maintain a normal life, like it gives me goosebumps thinking about it still, the impact that we had.

And now Jackson, he's, you know, seventh grade and doing great and it's just amazing.

And for us to be able to have that impact on their lives, you know, it's what we do every day.

But we get so wrapped up in the day to day of making the work happen that, you know, sometimes we forget to focus on that impact.

And it's incredible.

- That is fantastic, I would assume that especially someone who's going somewhere every week or every day, the pilots might end up having a great relationship with that person because they're maybe just the two of them in an airplane conversing every day.

- They do.

They become like family.

We have a woman who we flew from rural Missouri to City of Hope for cancer treatment.

We flew her over a hundred flights and often it was the same pilots volunteering again and again.

She flew every few months.

And when she passed away about a year ago, the influx of messages we had from pilots were just incredible because they had formed this great bond with their family.

And her daughter actually spoke recently at a pilot forum that we had just kind of sharing that passenger experience.

And we had so many pilots attend who just wanted to see her family again because the family would, you know, take turns flying with her to treatment.

And yeah, they just formed such a great bond.

So when we have passengers who are recurring, it's often fairly easy to get pilots because we can go back to the people who've flown them before and say, Hey, you know, so and so is flying again.

Would you like to take that flight?

And they'll usually grab it.

- And I'm sure these people are so happy to have these flights that they're model passengers.

- Most of them.

Yes.

- Most of them.

- People are people.

Right.

- That's true.

That's true.

- And honestly, people are going through a really hard time.

You know, when people, the passengers that we fly are traveling often for, you know, life-saving medical treatment, they're going through clinical trials, they're experiencing the hardest moments in their lives.

And so we offer as much grace as we can.

And yeah.

But our passengers are usually very grateful.

- Do you ever have to turn anyone down because maybe their health issue isn't life threatening or it's not what some would say serious?

- Not really.

I mean, everybody who contacts us, the medical condition that they have is serious to them.

You know, we get that physician's release, which verifies the need.

You know, sometimes like with any organization, we get people contacting us that aren't legitimate.

But that physician's release really enables us to know that the reason they're flying is a legitimate issue.

And it's not necessarily that every issue is life threatening, but it's life altering.

- Sure.

- You know, that someone's comfort, to be able to have some sort of procedure done that they wouldn't have been able to have locally or that they would've foregone and it would've really impacted their quality of life.

And so, yeah, I mean, we hear about just the rarest of the rare conditions because those are the people that are needing to travel for medical care.

- And speaking about the pilots, besides obviously having a pilot's license, are there any steps they have to go through to be able to be a LifeLine pilot?

- Yeah, so we have minimum qualifications.

So pilots have to have 250 hours is pilot in command of an aircraft.

And they have to meet all their FAA regulations.

They have to have insurance, they have to have basic medical.

So pass their medical exam every year.

And then they also have to be 21 years or older.

So we're unable to take younger pilots than 21.

So that minimum requirement of the 250 hours means that people are really experienced pilots at the time that they're taking a passenger, which is great for us to be able to do.

We take pilots who are instrument rated or not, not all the organizations do, but here in the Midwest, you know, people who fly with the visual flight rules are well qualified to fly for us.

- I would assume that the, you know, once the pilots have those qualifications and they own the plane, it's a pretty decent plane.

Have you ever seen a plane and said, no thanks?

- No, no.

I mean our airplanes are interesting.

They're a little different to cars.

You know, a lot of pilots are flying airplanes that were built in the fifties, sixties.

We have one pilot who flies outta Champaign and his son is the third generation pilot flying for LifeLine pilots in the same airplane.

- Wow.

- And so his dad started flying 40 years ago for Wanda in this airplane.

And now he flies for us and his son is working his pilot's license and he'll continue the legacy and continue to fly.

So this airplane is 50 years old, but I've flown in it and you would not know that from flying in it.

It is a beautiful airplane and the airplanes are kept up to date.

You know, they have modern avionics and yeah, our pilots take meticulous care of their airplanes because it's their life as well as whoever they're flying.

You know, when you're getting in an airplane, it's different than getting in a car.

You're doing all the safety checks and if something doesn't meet that minimum requirement, you are not flying that day.

And that's the other thing about our service, that we're non-emergency.

So we ask that everybody has a backup plan because if for some reason the pilot can't fly that day, we may have to have, either they use their backup plan or they change the date of their appointment and we reschedule their flight.

'cause if the pilot goes and starts their check that day and they realize that something's wrong with their airplane, or if weather impacts the flight, because weather definitely impacts small airplanes a lot more than the commercial airplanes.

And we know how many flights are canceled because the commercial, because of weather with commercial airplanes.

So we always make sure that people have backup plans because of that.

Because we say in general aviation, you never have to fly.

So it's safety before all else.

- With this organization now being, wow, more than 40 years old, are there any speed bumps, any hurdles that you're facing in 2024?

- Our biggest hurdle is getting the message out there throughout our 10 state region, but also here in Peoria.

We want everybody who needs our service to know we exist.

We are, last year we flew almost a thousand flights.

We have a goal by 2026 to be doing 1500 flights a year.

And the thing is, is that it's not that we want people to get sick, we know people are sick and they don't have access to medical care.

Over, I believe it's 5 million people a year do not access medical care in the United States because they don't have a transportation to get there.

So we wanna make sure that we're bridging that transportation barrier and that we're able to help people in their time of need.

But to do that, we just have to get the word out.

- And to get the word out, do you ever go directly to the hospitals or the doctors and say, "Hey, we have this service, let your patients know?"

- Yeah, we try to do that as much as we can.

Hospital systems are complex, so it's tricky.

And, you know, the change of people happens a lot.

You know, there's a lot of turnover that is happening within medical systems.

But we're trying to educate people who are kind of that patient facing roles.

So the case managers and your nurse navigators and social workers, people who really are taking the time to help patients figure that out.

Here in Peoria, you know, we've done lot of work to get the word out through the OSF system, especially with the cancer center opening.

And they're well aware that we exist because we don't always have to fly people out of Peoria.

We wanna help people to access the amazing treatment options that we have here.

- Yeah, that's a good point with the new cancer center.

I think a lot more people will be coming to Peoria instead of going out.

Well that is a tremendous story.

I mean it's one of those things, you may not think it's out there.

You may not think you ever need it, but you could, you never know.

- Yeah, and what we tell people is help us share the message.

You know, we provide that free transportation to medical care anywhere from a hundred to a thousand miles.

So when you come across a family in need, just share the message.

You never know, you know, we might be able to help.

- And are you looking for more pilots?

- We are always looking for more pilots.

The more pilots we have, the more capacity we have to fly people.

So as long as you meet those minimum requirements of 250 hours as pilot in command and 21 years old and you have all of your FAA regulations met, then reach out to us.

We'd love to have pilots on board.

- Alright, well hopefully somebody watching this maybe has an airplane and thinks, Hey, that'd be a good idea.

- I hope so.

- Lindsey with LifeLine Pilots, we appreciate it.

What's the best way for people to find out more about your organization and spread the word?

- Sure, so LifeLinePilots.org would be the best way to find out about us.

That's where you can find our pilot application, our passenger application.

If somebody wants to, needs our help to fly to medical care, they can self refer.

Or you know, if a family member or a medical professional wants to refer, they can do that as well.

And then we're on all the social media channels, just, you know, type in LifeLine Pilots and you can follow us and share our posts.

- Alright, well best of luck, and thanks for bringing that service to our area.

It's tremendous.

- Thanks for having me.

- Thank you.

And thank you for joining us.

We appreciate it.

You can check us out anytime at wtvp.org, on Facebook and Instagram and a lot more.

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