Private aviation medical flights are critical for time-sensitive organ transplants saving thousands of lives annually.
Doctors in the U.S. perform around 100 infant heart transplants per year, and private aviation plays a critical role, according to a 3,400-word article today in The New York Times.
“90 Minutes to Give Baby Luna a New Heart” by Samir Bajaj chronicles the six-hour procedure.
The procedure took place in September at NewYork-Presbyterian Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital in northern Manhattan.
Bajaj writes:
‘Every year, doctors in the United States perform about 100 infant heart transplants, an operation on the ragged edge of what’s possible. They remove the heart from one baby whose life has functionally ended, pack it on ice, and then coax it back to life in another. The margin for error comes down to minutes, stitches, and a few fragile millimeters.’
Minutes matter.
“They would keep Luna alive with a mechanical pump as they cut her heart out,” Bajaj wrote.
He continued, “When the donor heart arrived, Dr. (Maureen) McKiernan would have 90 minutes to get it beating inside her.”
The transplant operation would not have been possible without private aviation.
Bajaj wrote, “The donor heart had belonged to a baby — just a few months old — who had died hundreds of miles away.”
How could it get to Baby Luna in time?
“It was flown into Teterboro, N.J., by private jet and rushed to Manhattan with a police escort, arriving at NewYork-Presbyterian in a white Styrofoam cooler,” The New York Times reporter noted.
Time is so critical; the doctors needed to remove Baby Luna’s heart before the private jet landed at Teterboro Airport.
Dr. McKiernan noted, “What if we don’t get this heart — and we’ve already taken her heart out?”
During a 2022 protest against private jets at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport, a medical flight had to be diverted.
During the recent U.S. government shutdown, a group called Patriotic Millionaires called for a ban on private jet flights.
When challenged, a spokesperson said she believed that medical flights could continue.
However, she offered no concrete plan for doing so.
Instead, the spokesperson for Patriotic Millionaires said, “For 15,000 private jet flights per day, if you want to identify the 200 that have sick patients or organs, we are certain the FAA can work something out.”
However, experts said banning non-medical private flights would also affect medical flights.
Former FBO executive Millie Hernandez-Becker of SkyQueen Reality told Private Jet Card Comparisons during the shutdown that a broad ban “just doesn’t pencil out.”
She noted that the medical and urgent cargo flights are indeed a small part of the market, despite their critical nature.
She said it would be economically impossible for FBOs and other dedicated ground support to operate if there were a significant reduction in general private jet flying.
Former Grandview Aviation President Jesse Naor noted the Phenom 300 operator conducted 400 life-saving flights annually.
Naor said the Patriotic Millionaires’ analysis of transplant flights likely doesn’t account for time limits across different organ groups.
While kidney transplants have a 48-hour window, she said lung transplants require less than four hours, heart transplants require less than six hours, and liver transplants have only a 12- to 18-hour window.
She estimated that there are 10 to 20 flights nationwide daily just for heart transplants.
A ban such as that proposed by the Patriotic Millionaires, she said, would quickly mean that operating those organ donor flights would become “difficult if not impossible.”
Private aviation also serves as first responders after hurricanes and other national disasters, flying thousands of disaster relief flights annually and saving hundreds of thousands of lives.
In October, private aviation played a critical role in delivering medical shipments and life-critical supplies to Jamaica after Hurricane Melissa.
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