#pensacola airport transportation

[pcbshuttle]

The Advantages Of Airport Taxi Services

Although several people choose to drive themselves or take the airport shuttle to get to the airport, there is something about hiring taxi service to Panama City Beach Airport, ECP. Most people might not even see these as benefits, but they indeed are. Here are some for the main benefits of hiring airport taxi services: • When you hire from a reputed taxi service, you can be sure that the car will arrive in time, at the location that you specify. The car will be clean and comfortable and you can even book in accordance with the size you want. So, if it is just you travelling, you can hire a small car and if you are travelling in a large group, you can even book a van! You will not have to go looking, because the service provider will take care of it all. • If you know who to contact, getting airport transportation to Northwest Florida Beaches International Airport, ECP should be super easy. The car that meets your requirement will arrive at a time you specify; the driver will assist you in stacking all the luggage in a neat and safe manner and then take you directly to the terminal. Once you reach, they will also help you unload the luggage and send you off with a smile! • Choose to hire airport transportation to Tallahassee International Airport, TLH from a reliable service provider and you can be assured of the safety. Even if women or children are travelling alone, with a reputed taxi service provider, there is generally nothing to worry about. • And then there is the most important aspect – when you hire a taxi service, you can just sit back and relax all the way to the airport. There is no worry about parking the vehicle or where to stop; the driver will ensure that you are dropped, exactly where you need to be! With PCB Shuttle, airport transportation to Pensacola International Airport, PNS will become a breeze, so try it out the next time you are off on a voyage!

[nikkithehoe]

Brandy, our newest employee. 

[petnews2day]

TSA Finds Gun Stuffed Inside Holiday Bird

New Post has been published on https://petnews2day.com/pet-news/bird-news/tsa-finds-gun-stuffed-inside-holiday-bird/

TSA Finds Gun Stuffed Inside Holiday Bird

At Fort Lauderdale’s airport, the TSA found a gun hidden inside a Kikiri Quirch baking hen.

getty

The holiday travel season has officially arrived, it seems. Transportation Security Administration (TSA) officers at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport found a gun stuffed inside a raw baking hen.

Add it to the more than 700 firearms caught at security checkpoints in Florida airports so far in 2022 – over 120 of which were stopped at Fort Lauderdale’s airport. The Sunshine State, the nation’s most popular tourism destination, accounts for 14% — or about one in seven — of all firearms found at U.S. airports this year.

MORE FROM FORBESTSA: Florida Airports Are Setting Records For Loaded Guns This YearBy Suzanne Rowan Kelleher

“There’s a personal fowl here,” began the TSA’s pun-filled tweet. “The plot chickens as we barrel our way closer to Thanksgiving. For us, it’s a time to be thankful that our officers are always working around the cluck to keep you safe.”

When a TSA officer spots a handgun on the x-ray machine, the screening line comes to a halt while local law enforcement is notified. Local police then takes control of the firearm and removes the traveler and the weapon from the checkpoint.

Regardless of whether the police bring a criminal charge, getting caught with a firearm at an airport checkpoint carries a civil fine of $1,500, according to TSA guidance. If the gun is loaded, then the fine jumps to $3,000. Civil penalties can be much more onerous for repeat offenders, climbing to a potential maximum of $13,910.

Higher penalties can also meted out based upon aggravating factors, such as whether the firearm was carried on the violator’s person, whether the firearm is loaded or if the safety is off. TSA officers will also consider whether the violator took great pains to hide the gun, perhaps behind the lining of a suitcase or inside a hollowed-out bar of soap.

So far this year, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has levied more than $20 million in civil penalties against travelers caught with guns at security checkpoints, according to a TSA official. But that has done little to stem the tide of a record-breaking number of guns ending up at airport checkpoints. With the busy holiday travel season still ahead, the TSA has already caught more than 5,000 guns in 2022, which puts the agency on track to break last year’s record of 5,972 firearms detected at checkpoints.

The TSA regularly posts its “good catches” on social media, often tucked alongside corny jokes.

“Take for instance this ‘hen you believe it?’ find at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport,” the tweet continued. “We hate to beak it to you here, but stuffing a firearm in your holiday bird for travel is just a baste of time. This idea wasn’t even half-baked; it was raw, greasy, and obviously unsupervised. The only roast happening here is this poor packing choice!”

With about eight weeks left in 2022, records have already been set at 12 Florida airports. Orlando International Airport (MCO), the gateway to the Disney World and Universal Orlando theme parks, tops the list with 129 intercepted guns to date this year. Last year, TSA found 124 guns at Orlando airport in the entire year, as Disney World also saw a spike in concealed firearms.

MORE FROM FORBES$52 Million In TSA Fines Hasn’t Stopped Travelers Bringing Loaded Guns To Airport SecurityBy Suzanne Rowan Kelleher

Among other major airports in the state, so far this year the TSA has stopped 102 guns at Tampa International (TPA), 83 guns at Miami International (MIA), 58 guns at Jacksonville International Airport (JAX), 37 guns at Southwest Florida International (RSW), 28 at Palm Beach International (PBI), and 24 at Pensacola International (PNS).

According to the TSA, “nearly every gun” stopped at Florida airport checkpoints was loaded and most had ammunition chambered.

Guns, ammunition and gun parts are prohibited beyond airport security checkpoints. Passengers may legally travel with their firearms, but only if they are packed, unloaded, in a locked hard-sided case in checked luggage and declared with the airline before the flight.

“Feather you like it or not, there are rules for traveling with guns and ammunition,” the agency counseled on Twitter. “So, don’t wing it.” The post included a link to the TSA’s guidance on how to legally transport firearms.

[pinerjournal]

Warbirds over the beach 2016

Warbirds over the beach 2016 how to#

Warbirds over the beach 2016 generator#

Whilst the Thunderbirds are based at Nellis AFB in Nevada, the Blue Angels are actually based at NAS Pensacola in Florida’s Panhandle. Two of America’s top military aerobatic display teams, the United States Air Force Thunderbirds flying Lockheed (General Dynamics) F-16 Fighting Falcons and the United States Navy Blue Angels flying Boeing (McDonnell Douglas) F/A-18E/F Super Hornets regularly perform at some of Florida’s Air Shows. Air Demonstration Teams visiting Florida in 20 There are plans to re-open as a much larger and more aviation themed attraction in the future. The nearby Fantasy of Flight museum at Polk City used to offer daily (Thursday through Sunday) aerial demonstrations subject to the weather but they shut the main museum to the general public on Apand are currently operating a seasonal interim museum with joy rides in vintage biplanes on the days the museum is open. In the end this was cancelled as well and it now looks like it has been replaced by the Space Coast International Air Show In October 2019 the Board of Directors of the Valiant Air Command museum voted on cost grounds to postpone the 43rd Space Coast Warbird Airshow to 2021 so there was no Space Coast Warbird Airshow in 2020. Air Shows at Florida Air MuseumsĪ couple of Florida’s air museums like the Valiant Air Command at Titusville (Space Coast Warbird Airshow, formerly TICO Warbird Airshow) and the Florida Air Museum in Lakeland (Sun 'n Fun Fly-In and Convention) host annual air shows each Spring. Experimental Aircraft Association (EAA) Ford-Tri-Motor Tourĭue to the COVID-19 pandemic, none of the vintage air tours came to Florida in 2021.Experimental Aircraft Association (EAA) Aluminium Overcast Tour.Commemorative Air Force (CAF) AirPower History Tour.Wings of Freedom Tour by the Collings Foundation.For a fee, you can often get a ride in one of them. This is an opportunity to see real vintage and World War II aircraft in flight rather than just as static museum exhibits. Over the space of a couple of months they visit a number of regional airports throughout the state. Though not air shows as such, there are a number of vintage and warbirds aircraft tours that often visit Florida in the spring. NAS Key West Southernmost Air Spectacular NAS Pensacola Open House, Blue Angels Homecoming Air Show NAS Jacksonville Air Show - Birthplace of the Blue Angels Up Up and Away Florida Hot Air Balloon Festival Wings Over Homestead ARB - POSTPONED UNTIL 2023 NAS Key West Southernmost Air Spectacular - POSTPONED UNTIL 2023 Gator Fly In and Armed Services Appreciation Day Favourite Things To Do In Central Florida.

Warbirds over the beach 2016 generator#

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Warbirds over the beach 2016 how to#

if you ever want to join the "rare and crazy breed" you can always attend one of our jump schools and we'll teach you how to do it! In the mean time look for us to perform at the Mid-Atlantic Air Museum's airshow in June in Reading, Pennsylvania and at the Warbirds Over Monroe event in November in Monroe North Carolina which is Tinker Belle's home town.Īnd. We have been treated very well by everyone at the museum these past years and look forward to returning next year. We were looking forward to a repeat appearance this year as well but it looks like the museum's budget won't allow it. So there is historical precedent for jumping from her. As I'm sure you know, the C-46 was used not only as a transport aircraft flying the "Hump" during WWII but also as a jump platform for the "Operation Varsity" jumps. Tinker Belle is a a great aircraft and her crew and owners are the best. That is why we were outfitted as Fallshirmjaeger but jumped a US aircraft. Last year we were scheduled to do it again but the aircraft had some difficulties so we jumped from Tinker Belle instead (the show must go on.). As far as I know, the only group to make static line parachute jumps from a Ju52 since the war. We do traditionally jump US but a few years ago had the rare privilege of jumping as Fallshirmjaeger from the Museum's Ju52. The same group that has been jumping at this show for several years now. I'm a member of the WWII Airborne Demonstration Team.

[zabeelinsti02]

The Interesting History of IATA Codes - Who Knew?

Take a gander at your baggage tag or air waybill and you'll see air terminal codes rather than beginning and objective city names explained. IATA (International Air Transport Association) relegates a three-letter identifier code to each business air terminal on the planet. (Incidentally, articulate it "Eye-ah-ta,") It's no secret the way that IATA concocted BOS for Boston or STL for St. Louis. However, why in the world did it relegate MCI to Kansas City, IAD to Washington Dulles or EWR to IATA Training?

Turns out there was strategy to the frenzy. At the point when they began doling out IATA codes, certain prefixes were saved. The Navy got the "N" prefixes. Naval force pilots train at NPA (Navy Pensacola), for example. Remove the "N" from Newark and EWR appears to be legit. Nacogdoches, TX? OCH.

With few special cases, prefixes starting with "W" or "K" are by and large not utilized for USA air terminals in case they be mistaken for radio broadcast call letters. So IATA Foundation Diploma before Washington Dulles opened they were inclining in the direction of DIA (Dulles International Airport) however at that point understood that it very well may be excessively effectively mistaken for adjacent Reagan (DCA-District of Columbia Airport), particularly when harried cargo agents were jotting chalk letters on stuff trucks. Stick the D toward the end and International Airport Dulles doesn't appear to be so insane.

Some time before the Wright Brothers, the National Weather Service specked stations around the country with two letter city codes. Afterward, IATA embraced a portion of those by just adding a X. That is the reason we could transport from Portland, OR (PDX) to Los Angeles (LAX).

JFK Airport is a unique case in that it changed IATA code from IDL when it changed its name from Idlewild. Typically once a code is doled out, it stays relegated. So in the event that you jump on board a trip to Indianola, MS and have a truly old pilot, you should ensure he doesn't set out toward New York perceiving how Indianola assumed control over Idlewild's disposed of IDL.

An IATA code that beginnings with Y presumably implies your cargo is likely set out toward Canada. In a real sense many Canadian air terminal codes start with Y.

Who needs to be FAT? Fresno Air Terminal wouldn't fret. IATA Training Centre Dubai How would they get CMH out of Columbus? From Columbus Municipal Hangar. Astounded on CVG being Cincinnati? Cincinnati's air terminal really sits across the Ohio River in Covington, KY.

Record MCI for Kansas City under "past the point of no return now." Because of the underlying letter K limitations, the first Kansas City air terminal was MKC (Missouri Kansas City). At the point when they began arranging a major new air terminal somebody concluded that Mid-Continent International sounded pretty darned extravagant and got the MCI assignment. Before the air terminal opened, nearby legislators chose to change the name to Kansas City International so explorers would perceive their fair city. Interim, it was past the time to change the MCI code.

Alright, I've kept you in tension sufficiently long. You're pondering ORD for Chicago O'Hare, right? Halfway (MDW), its cross town rival, was blasting at the creases as the world's most active air terminal in the beginning of business jets. Authorities chose to construct a colossal new air terminal northwest of town where a small airstrip that had been renamed for gallant Navy pilot, Lt. Cmdr. Butch O'Hare. As MCI will vouch, when you get an IATA code transforming it is extremely difficult.

Zabeel Institute isaccredited by KHDA and fully endorsed by students as the best training institute in Dubai

[orbemnews]

United Airlines Adds Flights as Travel Demand Rises: Live Business Updates Here’s what you need to know: Most of United’s new flights will connect cities in the Midwest to tourist destinations.Credit…Sebastian Hidalgo for The New York Times United Airlines plans to add more than two dozen new flights starting Memorial Day weekend, the latest sign that demand for leisure travel is picking up as the national vaccination rate moves higher. Most of the new flights will connect cities in the Midwest to tourist destinations, such as Charleston, Hilton Head and Myrtle Beach in South Carolina; Portland, Maine; Savannah, Ga.; and Pensacola, Fla. United also said it planned to offer more flights to Mexico, the Caribbean, Central America and South America in May than it did during the same month in 2019. The airline has seen ticket sales rise in recent weeks, according to Ankit Gupta, United’s vice president of domestic network planning and scheduling. Customers are booking tickets further out, too, he said, suggesting growing confidence in travel. “Over the past 12 months, this is the first time we are really feeling more bullish,” Mr. Gupta said. Airports have been consistently busier in recent weeks than at any point since the coronavirus pandemic brought travel to a standstill a year ago. Well over one million people were screened at airport security checkpoints each day over the past two weeks, according to the Transportation Security Administration, although the number of screenings is down more than 40 percent compared with the same period in 2019. Most of the new United flights will be offered between Memorial Day weekend and Labor Day weekend aboard the airline’s regional jets, which have 50 seats. The airline said it would also add new flights between Houston and Kalispell, Mont.; Washington and Bozeman, Mont.; Chicago and Nantucket, Mass.; and Orange County, Calif., and Honolulu. All told, United said it planned to operate about 58 percent as many domestic flights this May as it did in May 2019 and 46 percent as many international flights. Most of the demand for international travel has been focused on warm beach destinations that have less-stringent travel restrictions. “That is one of the strongest demand regions in the world right now,” Mr. Gupta said. “A lot of the leisure traffic has sort of shifted to those places and it’s actually seen a boom in bookings.” Delta Air Lines issued a similar update last week, announcing more than 20 nonstop summer flights to mountain, beach and vacation destinations. Both airlines have said in recent weeks that they have made substantial progress toward reducing how much money they are losing every day. An outdoor seating area at a Bronx restaurant. The hospitality industry has been hit especially hard by job losses during the pandemic.Credit…Michael Young for The New York Times The labor market’s ability to improve as the economy recovers and the virus recedes will be tested Thursday morning when the government reports the latest data on unemployment claims. Although the pace of vaccinations, as well as passage of a $1.9 trillion relief package this month, has lifted economists’ expectations for growth, the labor market has lagged behind other measures of recovery. At 6.2 percent, the unemployment rate is still nearly three percentage points above where it was in February 2020, before the coronavirus arrived in force. Initial claims, counting regular unemployment insurance and emergency programs, have been at more than one million a week since the fall, partly because some workers have been laid off more than once. Still, the easing of restrictions on indoor dining areas, health clubs, movie theaters and other gathering places offers hope for the millions of workers who were let go in the last 12 months. And the $1,400 checks going to most Americans as part of the relief bill should help spending perk up in the weeks ahead. “We’re expecting to see sharp declines in jobless claims in the coming weeks as the service sector comes back online,” said Rubeela Farooqi, chief U.S. economist for High Frequency Economics. “The labor market will benefit from a reopening, but it will take time for a complete recovery.” Esther George, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, said she expected inflation to “firm,” given time.Credit…Ann Saphir/Reuters Esther George, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, says that although the outlook for growth has improved as vaccinations increase and the government rolls out relief packages, the path of the pandemic remains a major question hanging over the U.S. and global economies. “We’re not out of this yet,” Ms. George said in an interview on Wednesday. “It’s hard to know what the dynamics will be on the other side.” Ms. George said she was focused on labor force participation as a sign of the job market’s strength more than the headline unemployment rate, which has fallen to 6.2 percent from a 14.8 percent peak but misses many people who aren’t looking for new jobs after losing theirs during the pandemic. Participation, the share of people working or looking, remains a hefty two percentage points below its prepandemic levels. “That might be the thing I really watch in the coming months,” she said. Ms. George expects inflation to “firm,” but that the process is likely to take a while, she said, and it is “too soon to say” whether it will end with a more meaningful rise. Some prominent economists have begun to warn that prices, which have been low for decades, could rise rapidly as the government spends big and the Fed keeps rates at rock bottom to support the economic recovery. “Wages are a very telling factor in a story about inflation,” Ms. George said. Many economists look for faster growth in compensation as a signal that inflation is sustainable, not just driven by short-lived supply constraints or temporary quirks in the data. Ms. George’s colleagues, including Jerome H. Powell, the Fed chair, have been clear that they expect prices to move higher this year but will not necessarily see that as an achievement of their inflation goal. The Fed redefined its target last year and now aims for 2 percent annual price gains, on average, over time. Ms. George did not venture a guess of when the Fed will hit its three criteria for raising interest rates: full employment, 2 percent realized price gains and the expectation of higher inflation for some time. Some Fed officials expect to raise rates next year or in 2023, but most of them expect the initial increase to come even later. “We are here to help our small businesses, and that is why I’m proud to more than triple the amount of funding they can access,” said Isabella Casillas Guzman, the Small Business Administration’s administrator.Credit…Anna Moneymaker for The New York Times Companies harmed by the coronavirus pandemic can soon borrow up to $500,000 through the Small Business Administration’s emergency lending program, raising a cap that has frustrated many applicants. “The pandemic has lasted longer than expected,” Isabella Casillas Guzman, the agency’s administrator, said on Wednesday. “We are here to help our small businesses, and that is why I’m proud to more than triple the amount of funding they can access.” The change to the Economic Injury Disaster Loan program — known as EIDL and pronounced as idle — will take effect the week of April 6. Those who have already received loans but might now qualify for more money will be contacted and offered the opportunity to apply for an increase, the agency said. The Small Business Administration has approved $200 billion in disaster loans to 3.8 million borrowers since the program began last year. Unlike the forgivable loans made through the larger and more prominent Paycheck Protection Program, the disaster loans must be paid back. But they carry a low interest rate and a long repayment term. Normally, the decades-old disaster program makes loans of up to $2 million, and in the early days of the pandemic, the agency gave some applicants as much as $900,000. But it soon capped loans at $150,000 because it feared exhausting the available funding. That limit — which the agency did not tell borrowers about for months — angered applicants who needed more capital to keep their struggling ventures alive. The agency has $270 billion left to lend through the pandemic relief program, James Rivera, the head of the agency’s Office of Disaster Assistance, told senators at a hearing on Wednesday. Jane Fraser in 2019. “The blurring of lines between home and work and the relentlessness of the pandemic workday have taken a toll on our well-being,” she told Citigroup employees.Credit…Erin Scott/Reuters Complaints of “Zoom fatigue” have emerged across industries and classrooms in the past year, as people confined to working from home faced schedules packed with virtual meetings and often followed up by long video catch-ups with friends, reports Anna Schaverien of The New York Times. But Citigroup, one of the world’s largest banks, is trying to start a new end-of-week tradition meant to combat that fatigue: Zoom-free Fridays. The bank’s new chief executive, Jane Fraser, announced the plan for in a memo sent to employees on Monday. Recognizing that workers have spent inordinate amounts of the past 12 months staring at video calls, Citi is encouraging its employees to take a step back from Zoom and other videoconferencing platforms for one day a week, she said. “The blurring of lines between home and work and the relentlessness of the pandemic workday have taken a toll on our well-being,” Ms. Fraser wrote in the memo, which was seen by The New York Times. No one at the company would have to turn their video on for any internal meetings on Fridays, she said. External meetings would not be affected. The bank outlined other steps to restore some semblance of work-life balance. It recommended employees stop scheduling calls outside of traditional working hours and pledged that when employees can return to offices, a majority of its workers would be given the option to work from home up to two days a week. Tribune Publishing’s board recommended that shareholders approve a purchase offer from the hedge fund Alden Global Capital over a higher bid from a Maryland hotel executive, according to a securities filing Tuesday. Alden, Tribune’s largest shareholder, agreed last month to buy the rest of the company at $17.25 per share and take it private in a deal that would value the company at $630 million. Last week, Stewart W. Bainum Jr., a hotel magnate, made an $18.50 per share offer for the whole company. Source link Orbem News #adds #airlines #Business #demand #flights #Live #rises #Travel #United #Updates

[bisrsrch]

In North America, the U.S. is a prominent country in North America which is actively looking to modernize/upgrade the aircraft that can address a range of missions; this in turn, provide MRO service providers with new revenue streams over the next decade. North America is poised to maintain noteworthy aviation traffic growth, especially in domestic markets which enable MRO and network operators to continuously invest in hub strength in the form of increased capacity and airport improvements. For instance, in June 2018, ST Engineering Aerospace introduced a new airframe MRO facility in Pensacola, Florida, U.S at a cost of $46 million, in order to carry out heavy and line maintenance along with aircraft modification work.

MRO providers and airlines generally purchase used serviceable material (USM) from various traders at distinct prices, and many times, the cost of a used part may exceed that of a new component depending on the supply and demand for a particular component or part at the time of the transaction. Thus, there is no formal mechanism existing to access the value of used parts today. In order to deal with such circumstances, the International Air Transport Association (IATA) has taken initiatives to prepare a web-based pricing model which provide aftermarket players and airlines to real-time access to transparent market values for aircraft components, considering availability and delivery times for different parts and equipment. Such model enables the airlines and MRO providers to save material cost up to 10-15% and hence provide more opportunities for MRO providers to retain significant value from cost-effective and regular services.

For Sample Report, Click here: https://bisresearch.com/requestsample?id=841&type=download

[sentinelchicken]

Several years ago visiting Pensacola, the door to one of the restoration hangars was open so I peeked in and got this shot of the Consolidated PB2Y Coronado under restoration- today it’s on display inside the National Naval Aviation Museum. Note the four-bladed props inboard and three bladed ones on the outboard engine. The first PB2Y Coronados had three bladed propellers on all four engines. However, operational experience had shown that the inboard props were subject to more pitting and corrosion caused by the spray thrown up by the Coronado’s hull on landings and takeoffs. Since the outboard engines were further away, they weren’t as badly damaged by repeated spray exposure. As a result, the inboard engines on the Coronado fleet were refitted with four bladed props that were several inches shorter and less impacted by the spray. A smaller propeller with a fourth blade generated the same propulsive force as the larger original three bladed propellers which remained on the outboard engines. Note also the bomb bays in the wings behind the engine nacelles. In January and February 1944, the PB2Ys of VP-13 and VP-102 were assigned to conduct bombing raids on Wake Island which was occupied by the Japanese. VP-13 would attack with 13 Coronado aircraft at low level followed 25 minutes later by VP-102’s Coronados attacking from 8000 feet. Four such attacks were made the by the PB2Ys of both squadrons. For the most part, though, the Coronado fleet was used as transports as their range was actually shorter than that of the aircraft they were supposed to replace, the PBY Catalina. Ten PB2Ys were sold to the RAF, but they found the Short Sunderland to have better range and those RAF Coronados served in transport roles during the war. The Coronado on display at the National Naval Aviation Museum is the sole surviving example. | October Aviation Photo Challenge | @kjdphoto1971 | #1017planes | “Night at the Museum” | Day 13 | #avgeek #aviation #aircraft #planeporn #KNPA #NPA #NASPensacola #Pensacola #NationalNavalAviationMuseum #airport #Florida #Consolidated #PB2Y #Coronado #flyingboat #mil_aviation_originals #instaaviation #Avgeekery #AvgeekSchoolofKnowledge (at National Naval Aviation Museum)

[technologyinfosec]

Flight returns because woman wanted better seat

An American Eagle flight from Florida to Miami was forced to return to the airport after a woman passenger faked an illness mid-air to get a better seat. The woman was taken off the plane and into custody, reported CNN. Within an hour of take-off, from Pensacola in Florida, at 6:26 am on Friday the woman began demanding that she be given a bigger seat, the Pensacola Police Department said. However, when the cabin crew told her they could not offer her better accommodations, the woman became ill. The plane had to return to the airport for emergency medical assistance, according to a statement from the airlines. However, upon arrival it was revealed the woman was pretending to be ill and was asked to get off the plane, police said. The flight to Miami finally departed at 7:41 am while the woman was taken into custody and transported to a mental health facility for evaluation. She was detained under Florida's Baker Act that allows officials to take people into custody who may be impaired due to mental illness. Read the full article

[firstclassqueen]

Just boarded it #RoyalForceOne provided by #DeltaAirlines on my delay flight from @Pensacola #Florida to #Atlanta #Georgia. #Wanderlust #AVgeek #insideflyer #worldtraveler #globetraveler #aviation #firstclass #airplane #transportals #instatravel #travelgrind #Instagrind #traveller #travel #welltraveled #roadWarrior #travelenthusiast #bourgettois. (at Pensacola International Airport) https://www.instagram.com/firstclassqueen/p/BukTvUalLlW/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=15vniny6udjfb

[helloemptyset]

[ English image: State of Florida Emergency Travel Advisory

Reconsider Travel to the STate of Florida due to increased likelihood of racial profiling and abuse of civil liberties.

High Risk: Counties that have announced their collaboration with ICE ( Santa Rosa, Walton, Bay, Suwannee, Columbia, Hernando, Pasco, Pinellas, Hillsborough, Manatee, Sarasota, Charlotte, Lee, Polk, Monroe, Miami-Dade, Brevard, Indian River )

Moderate Risk: Places with higher likelihood of immigration arrests due to additional proximity to an international airport or seaport (  Escambia, Leon, Nassaul, Duval, Alachua, Seminole, Orange, St. Lucie, Palm Beach, Broward )

At Risk: May be asked to verify proof of citizenship for being within 100 miles of the coast ( Okaloosa, Holmes, Washington, Jackson Calhoune Gulf, Franklin, Liberty, Gadsden, Wakulla, Jerfferson, Taylor, Madison, Hamilton, Lafayette, Dixie, Gilchrist, Levy, Bradford, Union, Baker, Clay, Putnam, St. Johns, Flagler, Marion, Citrus, Sumter, Lake, Volusia, Osceola, Hardee, Desoto, Highlands, Okeechobee, Martin, Glades, Hendry, Collier )

Immigration detention centers or holding cells are in the following counties: Wakulla, Baker, Glades, Collier, Broward, Miami-Dade.

State of Florida, February 14, 2018: Emergency Travel Advisory: Reconsider Travel

Reconsider travel to the State of Florida due to increased likelihood of racial profiling and abuse of civil liberties.

Travel to all areas of the State of Florida should be done with heightened caution as it can be uncomfortable and/or unsafe for people of color, individuals who speak with an accent or any form of speech impediment, and international travelers. Florida had the biggest increase in ICE arrests in the United States. All non-white civilians are likely to be treated with "reasonable suspicion" especially if found within the 100-mile vicinity of a coastline. See below for Higher Risk Areas.

Though 1 in 5 Floridians is an immigrant, and 1 in 8 has immigrant parents, routine daily activities of those who cannot immediately prove U.s. citizenship at all times may result in restricted mobility and unconstitutional questioning about your involvement in housing, transporting, or providing any other form of aid to those who are not permanently carrying documentation to prove their birth within U.S. borders. Naturalized Cubans adn U.S. citizens from Puerto Rico are not immune from racial profiling and heightened scrutiny.

Be advised that in Miami and the 17 high risk counties detailed below, law enforcement's ability to provide routine and emergency response and protection to foreign-born individuals can be negatively impacted by the pressure on law enforcement agencies to exhaust their time and resources enforcing federal immigration law. Consult with a licensed attorney in advance of any travel to Florida so they can assess the level of danger you may encounter in being searched, questioned, and/or held in custody against your will. Brown, Black, Asian, and Native American people are most at risk.

Note the following High Risk Areas in Florida where your citizenship is likely to be questioned:

Counties with Sheriffs expanding their collaboration with Homeland Security: Miami-Dade, Bay, Brevard, Charlotte, Columbia, Hernando, Hillsborough, Indian River, Lee, Manatee, Monroe, Pasco, Pinellas, Polk, Santa Rosa, Sarasota, Suwannee, and Walton

Areas surrounding Florida's 66 Airports, including but not limited to major airports in: Miami, Fort Lauderdale, West Palm Beach, Orlando, Daytona, St. Petersburg, Clearwater, Sarasota, Bradenton, Jacksonville, and Tallahassee

Areas surrounding Sea Ports, including but not limited to: Miami, Cape Canaveral, Inverness, Fort Lauderdale, Fernandina Beach, Fort Pierce, Jacksonvill, Key West, Palmetto, Riviera Beach, Panama City, Pensacola, St. Petersburg, Tampa

Greyhound bus transportation and 7-11 Gas Stations/ Convenience Stores.

IF you decide to travel to Florida, make a Safety Plan:

Memorize the phone number for a licensed civil liberties and/or immigration attorney

Discuss a plan with loved ones regarding care/custody of children, pets, property, belongings.

Text UNIDOS to 31311 to stay connected and recieve Text Message Alerts (Standard rates apply)

Call the Immigrant Hotline: 1-800-600-5762 to report a home or work raid and learn more about your constitutional rights

These FL partners are here for you while visiting Florida. You may find advice and hospitality at our institutions if officers question or harass you for not carrying a U.S. birth certificate and/or U.S. passport:

The FLIC, Florida Immigration Coalition; Mi Familia Vota; The FANM, Fanm Ayisyen nan Miyami - Haitian Women of Miami;CAIR-Florida, Council of American Islamic Relations-Florida; QLatinx;  LatinoJustice; Central Florida, Jobs with Justice; RCMA, Redlands Christian Migrant Association; CTA, Orange County Classroom Teachers Association; FOMDD, Friends of Miami-Dade Detainees; (couldn't determine through logo); Interfaith Council of Central Florida; Fl Student Power; (couldn't determine through logo); (couldn't determine through logo); Women's March Florida; The New Florida Majority; Dream Defenders; Faith in Florida; SEIU Florida, Service Employees International Union Florida; Organize Florida; Advancement Project; SPLC, Southern Poverty Law Center; We Count! Florida; Alianza Americas; United We Dream. ]

--

[ Spanish Image: Advertencia De Emergencia Viajes En La Florida

Reconsidere los viajes al Estado de Florida debido a una mayor probabilidad de discriminación racial y abuso de las libertades civiles.

Alto Riesgo: Condados que han anunciado sus colaboraciones con ICE ( Santa Rosa, Walton, Bay, Suwannee, Columbia, Hernando, Pasco, Pinellas, Hillsborough, Manatee, Sarasota, Charlotte, Lee, Polk, Monroe, Miami-Dade, Brevard, Indian River )

Riesgo Moderado: Lugares con mayor probabilidad de detenciones de inmagración debido a la proximidad a un aeropuerto o puerto internacional ( Escambia, Leon, Nassaul, Duval, Alachua, Seminole, Orange, St. Lucie, Palm Beach, Broward )

En Riesgo: Se le puede pedir verificación de cuidadanía por estar a menos 100 millas de disancia de la costa

Centros de detención de inmigrantes o celdas de detención están en los siguientes condados: Wakulla, Baker, Glades, Collier, Broward, Miami-Dade.

Estado de la Florida, 14 de febrero, 2018: Advertencia De Emergencia Sobre Viajes: Reconsidere Viajar

Reconsidere los viajes al Estado de Florida debido a una mayor probibilidad de discriminatión racial y abuso de las libertades civiles.

El viaje a todas las áreas del estado de Florida debe realizarse con extrema precaución, ya que puede ser extremadamente incómodo y/o inseguro para personas que no sean de raza blanca, personas que hablan con acento o que padezcan de cualquier impedimento verbal, y viajeros internacionales. Florida tuvo el mayor aumento en arrestos de la policía federal migratoria (ICE) en los Estados Unidos el año pasado. Aparte de personas de raza blanca, todo individuo puede ser tratado bajo "sospecha razonable", especialmente si se encuentran dentro de 100 millas de la costa. Consule a continuación las áreas de mayor riesgo.

A pesar de que uno de cada cinco floridanos es inmigrante y que uno de cada ocho es hijo de un inmigrante, las actividades cotidianas de aqquellos que no pueden comprobar la cuidadanía estadounidense de inmediato puede resultar en movilidad restringida y pérdida de seguridad. Los familiares o amigos que acompañan a una persona nacida en el extranjero pueden estar sujetos a un interrogatorio inconstitucional sobre su participación que compruebe su estado migratorio. Los cubanos naturalizados y los ciudadanos estadounidenses de Puerto Rico no son inmunes a los perfiles raciales ni a un mayor escrutinio.

Tome en cuenta que la capacidad para proporcionar protección a personas nacidas en el extranjero puede ser negativamente impacta en este momento por la presión sobre las acencias policiales para agotar su tiempo y recursos colaborando con agencias de inmigración. Consulte con un abagado antes de viajar a Florida para que puedan evaluar el nivel de peligro en el que se bueda encontrar al ser registrado, cuestionado y/o detenido en contra de su vountad. Las personas de piel morena, negra, aciático e indígena están en mayor riesgo.

Por favor tomar nota de las siguientes Áreas de Alto Riesgo en Florida, donde es brobable que se cuestione su ciudandía:

Condados con Sheriffs que están expandiendo su colaboración con las autoridades migratorias federales: Miami-Dade, Bay, Brevard, Charlotte, Columbia, Hernando, Hillsborough, Indian River, Lee, Manatee, Monroe, Pasco, Pinellas, Polk, Santa Rosa, Sarasota, Suwannee, and Walton

Áreas geográficas alrededor de los 66 aeropuertos de Florida, que incluyen los siguientes aeropuertos principales: Miami, Fort Lauderdale, West Palm Beach, Orlando, Daytona, St. Petersburg, Clearwater, Sarasota, Bradenton, Jacksonville, and Tallahassee

Áreas geográficas circundantes a los Puertos Marítimos, que incluyen particularmente: Miami, Cape Canaveral, Inverness, Fort Lauderdale, Fernandina Beach, Fort Pierce, Jacksonvill, Key West, Palmetto, Riviera Beach, Panama City, Pensacola, St. Petersburg, Tampa

Transporte en autobús Greyhound y en sus paradas

SI decide viajar a Florida, haga un plan de seguridad:

Memorice el número de teléfono de un abogado de inmigración y/o derechos civiles debidamente autorizado

Establezca acuerdos con sus seres queridos sobre cómo proceder en cuanto al cuidado/custodia de niños, mascotas, propiedad, pertenencias

Envíe un mensaje de texto al 313131, con el mensaje UNIDOS, para recibir alertas (costo basado en su plan de teléfono)

Llame a la línea directa para inmigrantes: 1-800-600-5762 para denunciar una redada en su hogar o lugar de trabajo o conocer más sobre sus derechos constitucionales

Estas organizaciones en la FL les brindarán apoyo mientras visite a la Florida si algun oficial lo cuestionan o acosan por no llevar un certificado de nacimiento de los EE. UU., y/o el pasaporte de EE. UU.:

The FLIC, Florida Immigration Coalition; Mi Familia Vota; The FANM, Fanm Ayisyen nan Miyami - Haitian Women of Miami;CAIR-Florida, Council of American Islamic Relations-Florida; QLatinx;  LatinoJustice; Central Florida, Jobs with Justice; RCMA, Redlands Christian Migrant Association; CTA, Orange County Classroom Teachers Association; FOMDD, Friends of Miami-Dade Detainees; (no se pudo determinar a través del logo ); Interfaith Council of Central Florida; Fl Student Power; ( no se pudo determinar a través del logo ); ( no se pudo determinar a través del logo ); Women's March Florida; The New Florida Majority; Dream Defenders; Faith in Florida; SEIU Florida, Service Employees International Union Florida; Organize Florida; Advancement Project; SPLC, Southern Poverty Law Center; We Count! Florida; Alianza Americas; United We Dream. ]

State of Florida Emergency Travel Advisory

Read more: https://floridaimmigrant.org/our-work/state-of-florida-emergency-travel-advisory/

[stephenmccull]

How Lifesaving Organs For Transplant Go Missing In Transit

When a human heart was left behind by mistake on a Southwest Airlines plane in 2018, transplant officials downplayed the incident. They emphasized that the organ was used for valves and tissues, not to save the life of a waiting patient, so the delay was inconsequential.

“It got to us on time, so that was the most important thing,” said Doug Wilson, an executive vice president for LifeNet Health, which runs the Seattle-area operation that processed the tissue.

That high-profile event was dismissed as an anomaly, but a new analysis of transplant data finds that a startling number of lifesaving organs are lost or delayed after being shipped on commercial flights, the delays often rendering them unusable.

In a nation where nearly 113,000 people are waiting for transplants, scores of organs — mostly kidneys — are discarded after they don’t reach their destination in time.

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Between 2014 and 2019, nearly 170 organs could not be transplanted and almost 370 endured “near misses,” with delays of two hours or more, after transportation problems, according to an investigation by Kaiser Health News and Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting. The media organizations reviewed data from more than 8,800 organ and tissue shipments collected voluntarily and shared upon request by the United Network for Organ Sharing, or UNOS, the nonprofit government contractor that oversees the nation’s transplant system. Twenty-two additional organs classified as transportation “failures” were ultimately able to be transplanted elsewhere.

Surgeons themselves often go to hospitals to collect and transport hearts, which survive only four to six hours out of the body. But kidneys and pancreases — which have longer shelf lives — often travel commercial, as cargo. As such, they can end up missing connecting flights or delayed like lost luggage. Worse still, they are typically tracked with a primitive system of phone calls and paper manifests, with no GPS or other electronic tracking required.

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Transplant surgeons around the country, irate and distressed, told KHN they have lost the chance to transplant otherwise usable kidneys because of logistics.

“We’ve had organs that are left on airplanes, organs that arrive at an airport and then can’t get taken off the aircraft in a timely fashion and spend an extra two or three or four hours waiting for somebody to get them,” said Dr. David Axelrod, a transplant surgeon at the University of Iowa.

One contributing factor is the lack of a national system to transfer organs from one region to another because they match a distant patient in need.

Instead, the U.S. relies on a patchwork of 58 nonprofit organizations called organ procurement organizations, or OPOs, to collect the organs from hospitals and package them. Teams from the OPOs monitor surgeries to remove organs from donors and then make sure the organs are properly boxed and labeled for shipping and delivery.

From there, however, the OPOs often rely on commercial couriers and airlines, which are not formally held accountable for any ensuing problems. If an airline forgets to put a kidney on a plane or a courier misses a flight because he got lost or stuck in traffic, there is no consequence, said Ginny McBride, executive director of OurLegacy, an OPO in Orlando, Florida.

Ginny McBride, executive director of OurLegacy, an OPO in Orlando, Florida(JoNel Aleccia/KHN)

In an era when consumers can precisely monitor a FedEx package or a DoorDash dinner delivery, there are no requirements to track shipments of organs in real time — or to assess how many may be damaged or lost in transit.

“If Amazon can figure out when your paper towels and your dog food is going to arrive within 20 to 30 minutes, it certainly should be reasonable that we ought to track lifesaving organs, which are in chronic shortage,” Axelrod said.

For years, organs were distributed locally and regionally first, a system that resulted in wide disparities in organ waiting times across the country. In recent years, UNOS officials and the transplant community, with federal urging, have been working, organ by organ, to restructure how it’s done.

Amid those ongoing efforts to allocate organs more fairly — and, recently, a Trump administration effort to overhaul kidney care — the waste of some of these precious resources donated by good Samaritans has been overlooked. Last year, an average of nine people a day died while waiting for a new kidney.

Donor families and waiting patients may never know what’s happened to an organ provided by a loved one or why a surgery is canceled at the last minute.

“We have been unaware of how many kidneys have been waylaid,” said McBride, of the Orlando procurement agency. “That’s not a number that’s been transparent to us.”

But, she added, she’s aware of the risk: “I say a prayer and hold my breath every time a kidney leaves our office.”

46 Minutes To Spare

In October, a kidney en route from McBride’s OPO in Florida to a patient in North Carolina missed its connection in Atlanta. The box was prominently marked as a human organ and displayed a phone number to call. Apparently unaware of the urgency, a Delta cargo worker merely set it aside for a later flight.

The waiting transplant surgeon in Greensboro, North Carolina, “was having a fit,” said Kim Young, the OurLegacy organ recovery coordinator. If the kidney didn’t get to the hospital by 7 a.m., he wouldn’t be able to use it. Both the risk of organ failure and the chance of death increase with every hour a kidney is out of the body.

McBride had to decide whether to charter a plane at a cost of $15,000 — or to find a courier to drive the kidney through the night. She settled on the road trip, and the organ arrived at 6:14 a.m. — with just 46 minutes to spare.

Four months later, the transplant appears to have been a success, McBride said.

Delta Air Lines officials declined repeated requests to comment on its organ transport service or the specific incident McBride described.

Several domestic airlines, including Delta, United, American, Southwest and Alaska, provide special cargo services for organs with priority boarding, handling and monitoring. They all declined to comment on organ transportation.

The traveling public may not realize it, but thousands of transplant organs — mostly kidneys, but some pancreases — fly on commercial flights each year. Roger Brown, who runs the Organ Center at UNOS, estimates that as many as 10 organs for transplant are on the move this way every day.

Roger Brown, who runs the Organ Center at UNOS, estimates that up to 10 organs for transplant fly commercially every day.(Courtesy of UNOS)

UNOS handles about 1,800 of these organ and tissue shipments a year, of which 1,400 are kidneys. That’s a fraction of the nearly 40,000 organs transplanted in the U.S. last year, including more than 23,000 kidneys. About 1 in every 6 transplanted kidneys is shipped nationally, UNOS figures show.

Most of the time, the organs get where they’re going without incident, Brown said.

“We’re never going to get rid of flight delays. We’re never going to get rid of human error,” he said. “We’re never going to get rid of the person who’s [trying to be] a little too helpful and perhaps puts it someplace special, which then maybe creates issues downstream.”

Troubling Reports

Reports of trouble abound. In August, transplant officials at Medical City Dallas reported in a public forum that they’d lost three kidneys just that month because of problems with commercial flights.

“One organ was delayed due to weather and the next available flight wasn’t till the next day,” the report said. “Another organ made it to the airport, but was never placed on the intended flight. The third organ was mistakenly taken to the wrong airport and missed the intended flight.”

In Kentucky, transplant surgeon Dr. Malay Shah said a kidney traveling on Delta from Pensacola, Florida, via Atlanta, on Oct. 1 sat in the Lexington airport for three hours before he was notified it was there. No one had noticed the box with the label that said “human organ for transplant,” he said.

“It’s scary,” Shah said. “Organs traveling by this mechanism are treated as simply ‘baggage’ or ‘cargo.’”

Before the 9/11 terror attacks in 2001, OPO workers could take organs through airport security and see them loaded onto the plane from the passenger gate, McBride said. Because of changes in security protocol, airline employees now load organs on the tarmac, where they fly in pressurized cargo holds.

While anecdotes like Shah’s are common, there’s little data to show how often these transportation problems occur. No federal agency, including the Health Resources and Services Administration, or HRSA, which contracts with UNOS, requires monitoring of transportation for transplant organs.

“Matters involving the transportation methods used by organ procurement organizations (OPOs) are arranged directly between OPOs and transplant centers,” HRSA spokesperson David Bowman said in an email.

Airlines log organ shipments in internal booking systems and on cargo manifests, but those documents aren’t public and no summary is available, said Katherine Estep, communications director for Airlines for America, an industry trade group.

“Live human organs receive the highest priority designation,” she said in a statement.

UNOS researchers noted the impact of transportation problems in 2014. They found 30 organs discarded and 109 “near misses” between July 2014 and June 2015.

But the agency didn’t begin formally tracking transportation errors until 2016, when a new computer system came online. Before that, Organ Center staff kept track of problems informally, with pencil and paper, and the information wasn’t verified, Brown said.

Teams from organ procurement organizations, or OPOs, monitor surgeries to remove organs from donors and then make sure the organs are properly boxed and labeled for shipping and delivery.(Hannah Norman/KHN Illustration; labels courtesy of Ginny McBride)

Calls for closer tracking from within the system have been met with defensiveness — or apathy, said Brianna Doby, an organ transplant community consultant for the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.

“If you talk out loud about organ issues, they say it will drive down donation rates,” Doby said. “It’s not OK for us to say, ‘Well, shipping is hard.’ That’s not an acceptable answer.”

A National Network

UNOS was established in 1984 after Congress enacted the National Organ Transplant Act to address a critical shortage of donor organs and to improve organ matching and placement. It called for a national network to ensure that organs that couldn’t be used in the area where they were donated would be transplanted to save lives elsewhere. Before that, many organs were lost simply because transplant teams couldn’t find compatible recipients in time.

The act established the national Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network and called for the OPTN to be operated by a private, nonprofit organization under federal contract. UNOS, which has held the contract since the inception of OPTN, is overseen by HRSA, an agency of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Today, UNOS typically handles organs with conditions that can make them hard to place. That can include organs from older donors or those with medical or other characteristics that make them difficult to match.

Overall, about 7% of shipments handled by UNOS from July 2014 to November 2019 encountered transportation problems, the data obtained by KHN and Reveal showed. UNOS wouldn’t release details about individual shipments, including dates or places shipped or causes of the transportation failures or delays.

But Brown, of the UNOS Organ Center, said an internal analysis showed that more than half of the transportation problems were related to commercial airlines or airports. Of those, two-thirds were caused by weather delays, mechanical delays and flight cancellations.

About one-third of transportation problems were related to logistics providers or ground couriers, mostly delays of package pickups. The rest were related to the sender or receiver of the shipments. The most common issue was the package not being ready for pickup at the designated time.

However, Brown said, poor outcomes can’t be blamed directly on transportation problems, even when they do occur.

“The delay could be the primary reason an organ wasn’t transplanted,” he said. “It could be a contributing factor or it could have nothing to do with the reason that the organ is not transplanted.”

Other transplant experts downplay the impact of transportation problems. Kelly Ranum, president of the Association of Organ Procurement Organizations, said she’s “surprised at how low” UNOS’ failure numbers are, considering the volume of kidneys shipped.

Nearly 40,000 organs were transplanted in the U.S. last year, including more than 23,000 kidneys.(Photographer's Choice RF/Getty Images)

Dr. Kevin O’Connor, chief executive of LifeCenter Northwest, an OPO based in Seattle, said transportation problems are “minimal” compared with the other reasons organs — including about 3,500 donated kidneys — are discarded each year. These typically include biopsy findings, the inability to find a recipient and poor organ function.

“For over 30 years and literally tens of thousands of organs being transported,” he said, “I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times that, because of a transportation glitch, an organ was ultimately not transplanted.”

Still, O’Connor acknowledged that “even one kidney being thrown away because of transportation errors is unacceptable.”

Part of the problem lies with the way organs are transported now, said Axelrod, who also represents the American Society of Transplant Surgeons.

“We don’t have an end-to-end unified transportation system,” Axelrod said. “We don’t have a FedEx for transplant. We have a cobbled-together system of OPOs and couriers and private aircraft and commercial aircraft.”

In recent years, several courier companies have emerged to meet the market for transplant organs. Don Jones, chief executive of the Nationwide Organ Recovery Transport Alliance, or NORA, contracts with more than 15 OPOs and oversees about 400 organs a year on commercial flights.

“I would say 99.8% of our transports on commercial airlines go perfectly fine,” Jones said based on his estimate. Jones noted that his firm ships organs only on direct flights and uses GPS tracking to monitor them.

However, GPS tracking isn’t universal — or required by UNOS or HRSA. Some couriers and airlines use it; many don’t. Many OPOs monitor organs through a combination of verbal handoffs, automation and label scans, Brown said.

In Ginny McBride’s misadventure last fall, she contracted with a courier, Sterling Global Aviation Logistics, which used Delta Air Lines to ship the kidney.

Delta uses GPS trackers on its Dash Critical shipments, promising fast, guaranteed delivery of human organs. But on that night in October, the kidney was shipped from Orlando to Atlanta without a GPS tracker. In Atlanta, a cargo worker couldn’t find a GPS device to put on the box containing the kidney, so the worker held the organ for a later flight. That would have pushed it far beyond the window of viability.

An internal Delta report, obtained by McBride, found that Delta didn’t have enough GPS devices available in Atlanta that night. “Destination stations are not returning the devices in a timely manner,” according to the report. “One way to mitigate this from reoccurring is to have a larger inventory of GPS devises (sic) at each station.”

Delta declined to comment on the report.

The average wait time for a kidney varies widely nationwide, from less than three years to more than a decade. One proposal to put more organs to use called for eliminating the 58 donation service areas and 11 regions now used to allocate kidneys and replacing them with a zone of up to 500 nautical miles from the donor hospital.

In December, OPTN cut that range in half — to 250 nautical miles — in part because of an outcry about problems shipping kidneys via commercial air.

“There are certainly no technological barriers to doing GPS and to actually requiring it,” Brown said.

A UNOS committee is considering whether to collect data on transportation methods and outcomes, but, so far, the question remains under review.

“If the community wants it, they should ask for it,” Brown said. “We can help facilitate and get it done for them.”

McBride, who discussed solutions with her colleagues, hopes the transplant organizations will come together to solve transportation problems, to make sure every eligible donated kidney gets transplanted.

“Any organ that’s wasted, in my opinion, is a loss to the patient and to the community,” said Paul Conway, of the American Association of Kidney Patients, an advocacy group, who is himself a kidney recipient. “With all of the advances going on with drugs, with medical procedures, how can you have a logistics error be the barrier?”

This investigation and a related podcast represent a collaboration between Kaiser Health News and Reveal, from The Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR), a nonprofit news organization. Reveal, from CIR and PRX, is a nationally broadcast public radio show and investigative reporting podcast. Kaiser Health News (KHN) is a nonprofit news service covering health issues. It is an editorially independent program of the Kaiser Family Foundation that is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.

How Lifesaving Organs For Transplant Go Missing In Transit published first on https://smartdrinkingweb.weebly.com/

[jacewilliams1]

Flying with the famous and infamous

Flying Boeings and Bells was how I crossed paths with Charles Lindbergh, Mustapha Chafik, the Shah of Iran’s nephew, Mohamed Ali, Leonard Bernstein, and Richard Nixon. Geopolitics and the ups and downs of the airline business played a hand as well.

A Chat with Lindbergh

The year was 1968 and Charles Lindbergh was “non-reving “ (the airline term for flying free) in first class on our flight from Rome to New York’s J.F. Kennedy Airport. He was on the Pan Am board of directors and frequently flew to Europe, taking advantage of the company’s travel perks.

No longer the instantly recognizable flyer of his early years, he was a quiet, unpretentious traveler, indistinguishable from the other conservatively dressed older gentlemen seated in first class. Technology had long since moved beyond his expertise. By then Pan Am’s Stratorcruisers and Connies, planes he would have been more familiar with, were long gone and 707s and DC-8s routinely crisscrossed the globe. Doppler and inertial navigation systems had replaced navigators on most routes and main frame computers did the flight planning. Yet his relationship with Pan Am was mutually beneficial. He was a prominent personality on the board of directors and the company’s travel privileges were a convenient and economical way for him to maintain overseas relationships, some of which (the world later learned after his death) might have raised some eyebrows.

Charles Lindbergh, still dapper at 66, was a frequent Pan Am passenger.

We were advised before departure that he’d be with us and the captain passed word back that he was welcome to visit the cockpit in cruise flight. It was years before reinforced cockpit doors and captains had more latitude about who could visit the cockpit. I was the relief copilot, not scheduled for cockpit duty until later in the flight, but I hung around after my mandatory presence in the cockpit for the takeoff and initial climb, knowing that he’d be coming up soon. He came forward as the flight approached Paris. Lean and tall with thin gray hair, he moved easily into the jump seat behind the captain. Having long since left behind cockpit routines, and largely out of his element, he sat quietly as the captain and first officer went about cockpit chores.

With Paris passing below in clear skies, the captain pointed to Le Bourget airfield saying, “I guess you’re familiar with that place.” Lindbergh nodded with a smile. He then told us about an early flying experience in Mexico before World War II.

Navigating with spotty charts, he was unsure of his position so he flew low following railroad tracks hoping to read a town’s name on the side of a railroad station. He said: “As I flew by at rooftop level, the only sign I saw was CABALLEROS [men’s restroom] on a side door.” We all got a good chuckle. We shook hands and I left the cockpit, headed for my crew rest seat in first class. A few minutes later, he returned to his seat, settling in for a meal and a nap.

Instructing the Shah’s nephew

Well beyond my purview as a new hire copilot in 1968, Pan Am’s chairman, Juan Trippe, was gearing up for a major expansion of world air travel. In the mid 1960s he convinced Boeing to build the 747 and initially ordered 25. Trippe’s timing was years off the mark. The first Pan Am 747 arrived at New York’s JFK Airport in January 1970, about a year into what would become a major worldwide downturn in airline traffic. My furlough letter arrived by registered mail in December 1969, along with thousands of others sent to junior pilots at all the major airlines.

The Shah’s nephew was an avid, if not always diligent, pilot.

I returned to active military duty for two years as a standards instructor at Helicopter Training Squadron Eight in Pensacola. Iranian Lieutenant Mustapha Chafik, nephew of the Shah of Iran, was among my international flight students. He was comfortable in the ways of the west, had a cheerful manner, a ready smile and got on well with instructors and fellow flight students. Yet, Chafik was a product of the time in 1970s Iran. Savvy in the country’s politics and intrigues, he was careful to follow the iron-fisted dictates of his uncle, the Shah, who came to power following a US- and British-engineered coup of then Prime Minister Mosaddegh.

In Iran, Chafik occasionally flew helicopters but mainly commanded a flotilla of 14 high speed, armed hovercraft. My job as a standards instructor was to make him a competent helicopter instrument flyer. He progressed satisfactorily but shrugged off what he considered the details of air traffic control, flight planning and fuel tracking. The squadron’s UH-1H and TH-1L Huey helicopters had endurance of about 2 hours 40 minutes cruising at 110 to 120 knots. Consuming 8 to 10 pounds of JP 4 per minute, depending on the model, flight planning with attention to even small head and tailwind components and enroute fuel tracking was especially important. Computing groundspeed on the E6B, he’d smile and say, “If Allah wills it, it will be.” Same with holding pattern entries, NDB, VOR, and TACAN approaches. To him, terms like minimum enroute altitude, minimum off route altitude, and minimum sector altitude were esoteric abstractions he accommodated to get through the program. Smiling, he’d say, “In Iran, we follow camel tracks.”

Chafik completed the syllabus and returned to his hovercraft unit in Iran. Seven years later in what became known as the Islamic Revolution, the Shah was ousted and fled the country with his immediate family. Chafik, by then an Iranian Navy captain, was detained but managed to escape in an Iranian Navy hovercraft, eventually settling in his mother’s Paris apartment.

According to The New York Times, he hadn’t requested special security. On December 7, 1979, about a month after arriving, he was assassinated by an Iranian agent on a Paris street while carrying groceries home.

My seat by the Champ (Muhammad Ali)

Returning to Pan Am by the mid-70s, I did mainly flight safety projects at the company’s JFK flight operations headquarters and occasional special mission flying.

You never know who you’ll sit next to on an airplane.

Part of the job was representing Pan Am at the International Air Transport Association (IATA) on operational and safety issues. I was returning from a European IATA meeting in the late 1970s when Muhammad Ali bounded onto the plane just before the doors closed and sat down next to me. He was sweaty and had obviously been running to catch the flight. The plane was a Pan Am 747-100, with its spacious, open cabin and large first class seats. By then passengers were seated and settled in with their drinks so when Ali hustled into the cabin, they all noticed.

As time passed we started chatting. He had no pretensions and a kind of simple acceptance of his place on the world stage. As an aside, pointing to the Rolex watch on his wrist, he said, “People give me things.”

When I mentioned that I was a pilot and worked for Pan Am, he had lots of questions mostly about the working lives of airline pilots and their compensation. I explained that salaries were largely based on a plane’s payload and crew position and for that reason 747 captains were paid the most. He mulled the numbers and said, “That don’t seem like that much.”

I thought, but didn’t say… the Airline Pilots Association (which represented Pan Am pilots) would be pleased to hear you say that! But my response was: “Yes, you get a lot for fights but when you step into the ring you can get your head knocked off.”

He looked me in the eye and said, “Now you’re talking, man!” Then our midday meal was served. As the flight progressed, passengers sheepishly approached asking Mr. Ali to autograph their menus. He’d nod and sign.

The Maestro and the kids

The Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty was signed in March 1979, normalizing relations between the two countries. In 1980, an enterprising but overly optimistic Egyptian tour operator started Nefertiti Airlines and acquired N893PA, a Pan Am 707-321, to capitalize on anticipated cross border travel. It was a shoestring charter operation and ground to a halt two years later. On its final flight, the ill-maintained 707 landed at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport, where it was abandoned, impounded, and locked up with the last flight’s catering still on board.

It sat baking in the sun for months as Pan Am arranged to repossess it. By April 1982 most legalities were complete and as first officer I dead-headed from JFK with the captain and flight engineer to retrieve it. That’s how I crossed paths with Leonard Bernstein, shepherding a group of high school boys to Israel in upper deck first class on an El Al 747, from London to Tel Aviv.

Leonard Bernstein was all business during rehearsal.

Years earlier, in college, I attended a New Haven rehearsal where Bernstein was a visiting conductor at Yale. With the players seated and tuned up, wearing a sweat shirt and jeans, he walked in from the stage, stepped onto the conductor’s stand with his baton and began the rehearsal. He was serious and meticulous, directing with stops and repeats, all business, not the smooth beginning to end concert goers would later hear. It brought to mind the remark by Kaiser Wilhelm that if one likes sausage don’t watch how it’s made. Now in El Al first class, attired in business casual, laid back and at ease, he doted over his charges, chatting amiably in what seemed to me the drawn out speech affectations of New York’s art world. A long way, I thought, from the Boston accents of his childhood.

The next day, checking out N893PA, it was obvious the plane was in no shape to fly even under rules less stringent than FAR Part 121. Its moldy galley food trays were just an exclamation mark on the whole sorry scene. Several legal formalities remained as well. Meanwhile, mechanics from Israeli Aircraft Industries towed the N893PA into a hangar, where it was jacked up, hydraulic pumps activated, flight controls exercised, and the landing gear cycled and checked for leaks. With repairs underway and no prospect of departing for at least a couple of days we rented a car, drove to Jerusalem, and took in the sights.

On April 21, 1982, with enough repairs to make the plane airworthy for the ferry flight, we took off for London’s Stansted Airport. The captain recalled we departed with one of the four engine-driven generators inoperative, wing anti-ice system inoperative, and pages of inoperative components totaling about two dozen write-ups. Routing to London was as direct as possible, over lightly traveled airways of then Soviet-controlled Eastern Europe.

Eight months later, the Chinese government purchased N893PA for their Tianjin technical school. See Flying an Old Boeing to China For Christmas.

Gregarious Richard Nixon

In the early 1990s, La Guardia’s Marine Air Terminal was the bustling base of Delta’s 727 air shuttle operation, flying passengers to Boston Logan Airport and Washington National Airport. Savvy flyers preferred it because it was on LGA’s west side, away from the main terminals, allowing easier access and often less delays for takeoff and landing. Perhaps for those reasons Richard Nixon chose Delta for his trip to DCA that day in 1992.

By the 1990s, Nixon was long removed from politics, and perhaps more jovial because of it.

It was a morning flight and we were strapped in—making our cockpit nests, positioning Jepp pages on the 727’s side window clipboard, setting nav radios, RMI heading bugs, VOR courses, and engine EPR bugs—when a flight attendant popped in to say former President Nixon would be coming on board. By then he was living in Bergen County New Jersey, across the Hudson River from New York City.

Passenger boarding was delayed for a few minutes while gate agents blocked off seats for him and his Secret Service detail. Next, a phalanx of Secret Service agents took positions around where the President would be seated in the forward cabin. Then Nixon walked briskly on board, heading straight for the cockpit.

He wasn’t the dour man I remember in the 1972 photo giving a victory sign from the helicopter the day he left the White House. Rather, he was animated and smiling. “Good morning, how ya doing,” was what I recall as he leaned in over the control pedestal to shake hands. Nixon’s trip that day provided a new insight about the man who was so hobbled by his dark temperament, yet who ended the draft, negotiated the end of the Vietnam war, established the EPA, and began friendly relations with China. That cockpit visit told me he still wanted to be in the game.

The post Flying with the famous and infamous appeared first on Air Facts Journal.

from Engineering Blog https://airfactsjournal.com/2020/06/flying-with-the-famous-and-infamous/

[dinafbrownil]

How Lifesaving Organs For Transplant Go Missing In Transit

When a human heart was left behind by mistake on a Southwest Airlines plane in 2018, transplant officials downplayed the incident. They emphasized that the organ was used for valves and tissues, not to save the life of a waiting patient, so the delay was inconsequential.

“It got to us on time, so that was the most important thing,” said Doug Wilson, an executive vice president for LifeNet Health, which runs the Seattle-area operation that processed the tissue.

That high-profile event was dismissed as an anomaly, but a new analysis of transplant data finds that a startling number of lifesaving organs are lost or delayed after being shipped on commercial flights, the delays often rendering them unusable.

In a nation where nearly 113,000 people are waiting for transplants, scores of organs — mostly kidneys — are discarded after they don’t reach their destination in time.

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Between 2014 and 2019, nearly 170 organs could not be transplanted and almost 370 endured “near misses,” with delays of two hours or more, after transportation problems, according to an investigation by Kaiser Health News and Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting. The media organizations reviewed data from more than 8,800 organ and tissue shipments collected voluntarily and shared upon request by the United Network for Organ Sharing, or UNOS, the nonprofit government contractor that oversees the nation’s transplant system. Twenty-two additional organs classified as transportation “failures” were ultimately able to be transplanted elsewhere.

Surgeons themselves often go to hospitals to collect and transport hearts, which survive only four to six hours out of the body. But kidneys and pancreases — which have longer shelf lives — often travel commercial, as cargo. As such, they can end up missing connecting flights or delayed like lost luggage. Worse still, they are typically tracked with a primitive system of phone calls and paper manifests, with no GPS or other electronic tracking required.

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Transplant surgeons around the country, irate and distressed, told KHN they have lost the chance to transplant otherwise usable kidneys because of logistics.

“We’ve had organs that are left on airplanes, organs that arrive at an airport and then can’t get taken off the aircraft in a timely fashion and spend an extra two or three or four hours waiting for somebody to get them,” said Dr. David Axelrod, a transplant surgeon at the University of Iowa.

One contributing factor is the lack of a national system to transfer organs from one region to another because they match a distant patient in need.

Instead, the U.S. relies on a patchwork of 58 nonprofit organizations called organ procurement organizations, or OPOs, to collect the organs from hospitals and package them. Teams from the OPOs monitor surgeries to remove organs from donors and then make sure the organs are properly boxed and labeled for shipping and delivery.

From there, however, the OPOs often rely on commercial couriers and airlines, which are not formally held accountable for any ensuing problems. If an airline forgets to put a kidney on a plane or a courier misses a flight because he got lost or stuck in traffic, there is no consequence, said Ginny McBride, executive director of OurLegacy, an OPO in Orlando, Florida.

Ginny McBride, executive director of OurLegacy, an OPO in Orlando, Florida(JoNel Aleccia/KHN)

In an era when consumers can precisely monitor a FedEx package or a DoorDash dinner delivery, there are no requirements to track shipments of organs in real time — or to assess how many may be damaged or lost in transit.

“If Amazon can figure out when your paper towels and your dog food is going to arrive within 20 to 30 minutes, it certainly should be reasonable that we ought to track lifesaving organs, which are in chronic shortage,” Axelrod said.

For years, organs were distributed locally and regionally first, a system that resulted in wide disparities in organ waiting times across the country. In recent years, UNOS officials and the transplant community, with federal urging, have been working, organ by organ, to restructure how it’s done.

Amid those ongoing efforts to allocate organs more fairly — and, recently, a Trump administration effort to overhaul kidney care — the waste of some of these precious resources donated by good Samaritans has been overlooked. Last year, an average of nine people a day died while waiting for a new kidney.

Donor families and waiting patients may never know what’s happened to an organ provided by a loved one or why a surgery is canceled at the last minute.

“We have been unaware of how many kidneys have been waylaid,” said McBride, of the Orlando procurement agency. “That’s not a number that’s been transparent to us.”

But, she added, she’s aware of the risk: “I say a prayer and hold my breath every time a kidney leaves our office.”

46 Minutes To Spare

In October, a kidney en route from McBride’s OPO in Florida to a patient in North Carolina missed its connection in Atlanta. The box was prominently marked as a human organ and displayed a phone number to call. Apparently unaware of the urgency, a Delta cargo worker merely set it aside for a later flight.

The waiting transplant surgeon in Greensboro, North Carolina, “was having a fit,” said Kim Young, the OurLegacy organ recovery coordinator. If the kidney didn’t get to the hospital by 7 a.m., he wouldn’t be able to use it. Both the risk of organ failure and the chance of death increase with every hour a kidney is out of the body.

McBride had to decide whether to charter a plane at a cost of $15,000 — or to find a courier to drive the kidney through the night. She settled on the road trip, and the organ arrived at 6:14 a.m. — with just 46 minutes to spare.

Four months later, the transplant appears to have been a success, McBride said.

Delta Air Lines officials declined repeated requests to comment on its organ transport service or the specific incident McBride described.

Several domestic airlines, including Delta, United, American, Southwest and Alaska, provide special cargo services for organs with priority boarding, handling and monitoring. They all declined to comment on organ transportation.

The traveling public may not realize it, but thousands of transplant organs — mostly kidneys, but some pancreases — fly on commercial flights each year. Roger Brown, who runs the Organ Center at UNOS, estimates that as many as 10 organs for transplant are on the move this way every day.

Roger Brown, who runs the Organ Center at UNOS, estimates that up to 10 organs for transplant fly commercially every day.(Courtesy of UNOS)

UNOS handles about 1,800 of these organ and tissue shipments a year, of which 1,400 are kidneys. That’s a fraction of the nearly 40,000 organs transplanted in the U.S. last year, including more than 23,000 kidneys. About 1 in every 6 transplanted kidneys is shipped nationally, UNOS figures show.

Most of the time, the organs get where they’re going without incident, Brown said.

“We’re never going to get rid of flight delays. We’re never going to get rid of human error,” he said. “We’re never going to get rid of the person who’s [trying to be] a little too helpful and perhaps puts it someplace special, which then maybe creates issues downstream.”

Troubling Reports

Reports of trouble abound. In August, transplant officials at Medical City Dallas reported in a public forum that they’d lost three kidneys just that month because of problems with commercial flights.

“One organ was delayed due to weather and the next available flight wasn’t till the next day,” the report said. “Another organ made it to the airport, but was never placed on the intended flight. The third organ was mistakenly taken to the wrong airport and missed the intended flight.”

In Kentucky, transplant surgeon Dr. Malay Shah said a kidney traveling on Delta from Pensacola, Florida, via Atlanta, on Oct. 1 sat in the Lexington airport for three hours before he was notified it was there. No one had noticed the box with the label that said “human organ for transplant,” he said.

“It’s scary,” Shah said. “Organs traveling by this mechanism are treated as simply ‘baggage’ or ‘cargo.’”

Before the 9/11 terror attacks in 2001, OPO workers could take organs through airport security and see them loaded onto the plane from the passenger gate, McBride said. Because of changes in security protocol, airline employees now load organs on the tarmac, where they fly in pressurized cargo holds.

While anecdotes like Shah’s are common, there’s little data to show how often these transportation problems occur. No federal agency, including the Health Resources and Services Administration, or HRSA, which contracts with UNOS, requires monitoring of transportation for transplant organs.

“Matters involving the transportation methods used by organ procurement organizations (OPOs) are arranged directly between OPOs and transplant centers,” HRSA spokesperson David Bowman said in an email.

Airlines log organ shipments in internal booking systems and on cargo manifests, but those documents aren’t public and no summary is available, said Katherine Estep, communications director for Airlines for America, an industry trade group.

“Live human organs receive the highest priority designation,” she said in a statement.

UNOS researchers noted the impact of transportation problems in 2014. They found 30 organs discarded and 109 “near misses” between July 2014 and June 2015.

But the agency didn’t begin formally tracking transportation errors until 2016, when a new computer system came online. Before that, Organ Center staff kept track of problems informally, with pencil and paper, and the information wasn’t verified, Brown said.

Teams from organ procurement organizations, or OPOs, monitor surgeries to remove organs from donors and then make sure the organs are properly boxed and labeled for shipping and delivery.(Hannah Norman/KHN Illustration; labels courtesy of Ginny McBride)

Calls for closer tracking from within the system have been met with defensiveness — or apathy, said Brianna Doby, an organ transplant community consultant for the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.

“If you talk out loud about organ issues, they say it will drive down donation rates,” Doby said. “It’s not OK for us to say, ‘Well, shipping is hard.’ That’s not an acceptable answer.”

A National Network

UNOS was established in 1984 after Congress enacted the National Organ Transplant Act to address a critical shortage of donor organs and to improve organ matching and placement. It called for a national network to ensure that organs that couldn’t be used in the area where they were donated would be transplanted to save lives elsewhere. Before that, many organs were lost simply because transplant teams couldn’t find compatible recipients in time.

The act established the national Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network and called for the OPTN to be operated by a private, nonprofit organization under federal contract. UNOS, which has held the contract since the inception of OPTN, is overseen by HRSA, an agency of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Today, UNOS typically handles organs with conditions that can make them hard to place. That can include organs from older donors or those with medical or other characteristics that make them difficult to match.

Overall, about 7% of shipments handled by UNOS from July 2014 to November 2019 encountered transportation problems, the data obtained by KHN and Reveal showed. UNOS wouldn’t release details about individual shipments, including dates or places shipped or causes of the transportation failures or delays.

But Brown, of the UNOS Organ Center, said an internal analysis showed that more than half of the transportation problems were related to commercial airlines or airports. Of those, two-thirds were caused by weather delays, mechanical delays and flight cancellations.

About one-third of transportation problems were related to logistics providers or ground couriers, mostly delays of package pickups. The rest were related to the sender or receiver of the shipments. The most common issue was the package not being ready for pickup at the designated time.

However, Brown said, poor outcomes can’t be blamed directly on transportation problems, even when they do occur.

“The delay could be the primary reason an organ wasn’t transplanted,” he said. “It could be a contributing factor or it could have nothing to do with the reason that the organ is not transplanted.”

Other transplant experts downplay the impact of transportation problems. Kelly Ranum, president of the Association of Organ Procurement Organizations, said she’s “surprised at how low” UNOS’ failure numbers are, considering the volume of kidneys shipped.

Nearly 40,000 organs were transplanted in the U.S. last year, including more than 23,000 kidneys.(Photographer's Choice RF/Getty Images)

Dr. Kevin O’Connor, chief executive of LifeCenter Northwest, an OPO based in Seattle, said transportation problems are “minimal” compared with the other reasons organs — including about 3,500 donated kidneys — are discarded each year. These typically include biopsy findings, the inability to find a recipient and poor organ function.

“For over 30 years and literally tens of thousands of organs being transported,” he said, “I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times that, because of a transportation glitch, an organ was ultimately not transplanted.”

Still, O’Connor acknowledged that “even one kidney being thrown away because of transportation errors is unacceptable.”

Part of the problem lies with the way organs are transported now, said Axelrod, who also represents the American Society of Transplant Surgeons.

“We don’t have an end-to-end unified transportation system,” Axelrod said. “We don’t have a FedEx for transplant. We have a cobbled-together system of OPOs and couriers and private aircraft and commercial aircraft.”

In recent years, several courier companies have emerged to meet the market for transplant organs. Don Jones, chief executive of the Nationwide Organ Recovery Transport Alliance, or NORA, contracts with more than 15 OPOs and oversees about 400 organs a year on commercial flights.

“I would say 99.8% of our transports on commercial airlines go perfectly fine,” Jones said based on his estimate. Jones noted that his firm ships organs only on direct flights and uses GPS tracking to monitor them.

However, GPS tracking isn’t universal — or required by UNOS or HRSA. Some couriers and airlines use it; many don’t. Many OPOs monitor organs through a combination of verbal handoffs, automation and label scans, Brown said.

In Ginny McBride’s misadventure last fall, she contracted with a courier, Sterling Global Aviation Logistics, which used Delta Air Lines to ship the kidney.

Delta uses GPS trackers on its Dash Critical shipments, promising fast, guaranteed delivery of human organs. But on that night in October, the kidney was shipped from Orlando to Atlanta without a GPS tracker. In Atlanta, a cargo worker couldn’t find a GPS device to put on the box containing the kidney, so the worker held the organ for a later flight. That would have pushed it far beyond the window of viability.

An internal Delta report, obtained by McBride, found that Delta didn’t have enough GPS devices available in Atlanta that night. “Destination stations are not returning the devices in a timely manner,” according to the report. “One way to mitigate this from reoccurring is to have a larger inventory of GPS devises (sic) at each station.”

Delta declined to comment on the report.

The average wait time for a kidney varies widely nationwide, from less than three years to more than a decade. One proposal to put more organs to use called for eliminating the 58 donation service areas and 11 regions now used to allocate kidneys and replacing them with a zone of up to 500 nautical miles from the donor hospital.

In December, OPTN cut that range in half — to 250 nautical miles — in part because of an outcry about problems shipping kidneys via commercial air.

“There are certainly no technological barriers to doing GPS and to actually requiring it,” Brown said.

A UNOS committee is considering whether to collect data on transportation methods and outcomes, but, so far, the question remains under review.

“If the community wants it, they should ask for it,” Brown said. “We can help facilitate and get it done for them.”

McBride, who discussed solutions with her colleagues, hopes the transplant organizations will come together to solve transportation problems, to make sure every eligible donated kidney gets transplanted.

“Any organ that’s wasted, in my opinion, is a loss to the patient and to the community,” said Paul Conway, of the American Association of Kidney Patients, an advocacy group, who is himself a kidney recipient. “With all of the advances going on with drugs, with medical procedures, how can you have a logistics error be the barrier?”

This investigation and a related podcast represent a collaboration between Kaiser Health News and Reveal, from The Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR), a nonprofit news organization. Reveal, from CIR and PRX, is a nationally broadcast public radio show and investigative reporting podcast. Kaiser Health News (KHN) is a nonprofit news service covering health issues. It is an editorially independent program of the Kaiser Family Foundation that is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.

from Updates By Dina https://khn.org/news/how-lifesaving-organs-for-transplant-go-missing-in-transit/

[gordonwilliamsweb]

How Lifesaving Organs For Transplant Go Missing In Transit

When a human heart was left behind by mistake on a Southwest Airlines plane in 2018, transplant officials downplayed the incident. They emphasized that the organ was used for valves and tissues, not to save the life of a waiting patient, so the delay was inconsequential.

“It got to us on time, so that was the most important thing,” said Doug Wilson, an executive vice president for LifeNet Health, which runs the Seattle-area operation that processed the tissue.

That high-profile event was dismissed as an anomaly, but a new analysis of transplant data finds that a startling number of lifesaving organs are lost or delayed after being shipped on commercial flights, the delays often rendering them unusable.

In a nation where nearly 113,000 people are waiting for transplants, scores of organs — mostly kidneys — are discarded after they don’t reach their destination in time.

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Between 2014 and 2019, nearly 170 organs could not be transplanted and almost 370 endured “near misses,” with delays of two hours or more, after transportation problems, according to an investigation by Kaiser Health News and Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting. The media organizations reviewed data from more than 8,800 organ and tissue shipments collected voluntarily and shared upon request by the United Network for Organ Sharing, or UNOS, the nonprofit government contractor that oversees the nation’s transplant system. Twenty-two additional organs classified as transportation “failures” were ultimately able to be transplanted elsewhere.

Surgeons themselves often go to hospitals to collect and transport hearts, which survive only four to six hours out of the body. But kidneys and pancreases — which have longer shelf lives — often travel commercial, as cargo. As such, they can end up missing connecting flights or delayed like lost luggage. Worse still, they are typically tracked with a primitive system of phone calls and paper manifests, with no GPS or other electronic tracking required.

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Subscribe to KHN’s free Morning Briefing.

Sign Up

Please confirm your email address below:

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Transplant surgeons around the country, irate and distressed, told KHN they have lost the chance to transplant otherwise usable kidneys because of logistics.

“We’ve had organs that are left on airplanes, organs that arrive at an airport and then can’t get taken off the aircraft in a timely fashion and spend an extra two or three or four hours waiting for somebody to get them,” said Dr. David Axelrod, a transplant surgeon at the University of Iowa.

One contributing factor is the lack of a national system to transfer organs from one region to another because they match a distant patient in need.

Instead, the U.S. relies on a patchwork of 58 nonprofit organizations called organ procurement organizations, or OPOs, to collect the organs from hospitals and package them. Teams from the OPOs monitor surgeries to remove organs from donors and then make sure the organs are properly boxed and labeled for shipping and delivery.

From there, however, the OPOs often rely on commercial couriers and airlines, which are not formally held accountable for any ensuing problems. If an airline forgets to put a kidney on a plane or a courier misses a flight because he got lost or stuck in traffic, there is no consequence, said Ginny McBride, executive director of OurLegacy, an OPO in Orlando, Florida.

Ginny McBride, executive director of OurLegacy, an OPO in Orlando, Florida(JoNel Aleccia/KHN)

In an era when consumers can precisely monitor a FedEx package or a DoorDash dinner delivery, there are no requirements to track shipments of organs in real time — or to assess how many may be damaged or lost in transit.

“If Amazon can figure out when your paper towels and your dog food is going to arrive within 20 to 30 minutes, it certainly should be reasonable that we ought to track lifesaving organs, which are in chronic shortage,” Axelrod said.

For years, organs were distributed locally and regionally first, a system that resulted in wide disparities in organ waiting times across the country. In recent years, UNOS officials and the transplant community, with federal urging, have been working, organ by organ, to restructure how it’s done.

Amid those ongoing efforts to allocate organs more fairly — and, recently, a Trump administration effort to overhaul kidney care — the waste of some of these precious resources donated by good Samaritans has been overlooked. Last year, an average of nine people a day died while waiting for a new kidney.

Donor families and waiting patients may never know what’s happened to an organ provided by a loved one or why a surgery is canceled at the last minute.

“We have been unaware of how many kidneys have been waylaid,” said McBride, of the Orlando procurement agency. “That’s not a number that’s been transparent to us.”

But, she added, she’s aware of the risk: “I say a prayer and hold my breath every time a kidney leaves our office.”

46 Minutes To Spare

In October, a kidney en route from McBride’s OPO in Florida to a patient in North Carolina missed its connection in Atlanta. The box was prominently marked as a human organ and displayed a phone number to call. Apparently unaware of the urgency, a Delta cargo worker merely set it aside for a later flight.

The waiting transplant surgeon in Greensboro, North Carolina, “was having a fit,” said Kim Young, the OurLegacy organ recovery coordinator. If the kidney didn’t get to the hospital by 7 a.m., he wouldn’t be able to use it. Both the risk of organ failure and the chance of death increase with every hour a kidney is out of the body.

McBride had to decide whether to charter a plane at a cost of $15,000 — or to find a courier to drive the kidney through the night. She settled on the road trip, and the organ arrived at 6:14 a.m. — with just 46 minutes to spare.

Four months later, the transplant appears to have been a success, McBride said.

Delta Air Lines officials declined repeated requests to comment on its organ transport service or the specific incident McBride described.

Several domestic airlines, including Delta, United, American, Southwest and Alaska, provide special cargo services for organs with priority boarding, handling and monitoring. They all declined to comment on organ transportation.

The traveling public may not realize it, but thousands of transplant organs — mostly kidneys, but some pancreases — fly on commercial flights each year. Roger Brown, who runs the Organ Center at UNOS, estimates that as many as 10 organs for transplant are on the move this way every day.

Roger Brown, who runs the Organ Center at UNOS, estimates that up to 10 organs for transplant fly commercially every day.(Courtesy of UNOS)

UNOS handles about 1,800 of these organ and tissue shipments a year, of which 1,400 are kidneys. That’s a fraction of the nearly 40,000 organs transplanted in the U.S. last year, including more than 23,000 kidneys. About 1 in every 6 transplanted kidneys is shipped nationally, UNOS figures show.

Most of the time, the organs get where they’re going without incident, Brown said.

“We’re never going to get rid of flight delays. We’re never going to get rid of human error,” he said. “We’re never going to get rid of the person who’s [trying to be] a little too helpful and perhaps puts it someplace special, which then maybe creates issues downstream.”

Troubling Reports

Reports of trouble abound. In August, transplant officials at Medical City Dallas reported in a public forum that they’d lost three kidneys just that month because of problems with commercial flights.

“One organ was delayed due to weather and the next available flight wasn’t till the next day,” the report said. “Another organ made it to the airport, but was never placed on the intended flight. The third organ was mistakenly taken to the wrong airport and missed the intended flight.”

In Kentucky, transplant surgeon Dr. Malay Shah said a kidney traveling on Delta from Pensacola, Florida, via Atlanta, on Oct. 1 sat in the Lexington airport for three hours before he was notified it was there. No one had noticed the box with the label that said “human organ for transplant,” he said.

“It’s scary,” Shah said. “Organs traveling by this mechanism are treated as simply ‘baggage’ or ‘cargo.’”

Before the 9/11 terror attacks in 2001, OPO workers could take organs through airport security and see them loaded onto the plane from the passenger gate, McBride said. Because of changes in security protocol, airline employees now load organs on the tarmac, where they fly in pressurized cargo holds.

While anecdotes like Shah’s are common, there’s little data to show how often these transportation problems occur. No federal agency, including the Health Resources and Services Administration, or HRSA, which contracts with UNOS, requires monitoring of transportation for transplant organs.

“Matters involving the transportation methods used by organ procurement organizations (OPOs) are arranged directly between OPOs and transplant centers,” HRSA spokesperson David Bowman said in an email.

Airlines log organ shipments in internal booking systems and on cargo manifests, but those documents aren’t public and no summary is available, said Katherine Estep, communications director for Airlines for America, an industry trade group.

“Live human organs receive the highest priority designation,” she said in a statement.

UNOS researchers noted the impact of transportation problems in 2014. They found 30 organs discarded and 109 “near misses” between July 2014 and June 2015.

But the agency didn’t begin formally tracking transportation errors until 2016, when a new computer system came online. Before that, Organ Center staff kept track of problems informally, with pencil and paper, and the information wasn’t verified, Brown said.

Teams from organ procurement organizations, or OPOs, monitor surgeries to remove organs from donors and then make sure the organs are properly boxed and labeled for shipping and delivery.(Hannah Norman/KHN Illustration; labels courtesy of Ginny McBride)

Calls for closer tracking from within the system have been met with defensiveness — or apathy, said Brianna Doby, an organ transplant community consultant for the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.

“If you talk out loud about organ issues, they say it will drive down donation rates,” Doby said. “It’s not OK for us to say, ‘Well, shipping is hard.’ That’s not an acceptable answer.”

A National Network

UNOS was established in 1984 after Congress enacted the National Organ Transplant Act to address a critical shortage of donor organs and to improve organ matching and placement. It called for a national network to ensure that organs that couldn’t be used in the area where they were donated would be transplanted to save lives elsewhere. Before that, many organs were lost simply because transplant teams couldn’t find compatible recipients in time.

The act established the national Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network and called for the OPTN to be operated by a private, nonprofit organization under federal contract. UNOS, which has held the contract since the inception of OPTN, is overseen by HRSA, an agency of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Today, UNOS typically handles organs with conditions that can make them hard to place. That can include organs from older donors or those with medical or other characteristics that make them difficult to match.

Overall, about 7% of shipments handled by UNOS from July 2014 to November 2019 encountered transportation problems, the data obtained by KHN and Reveal showed. UNOS wouldn’t release details about individual shipments, including dates or places shipped or causes of the transportation failures or delays.

But Brown, of the UNOS Organ Center, said an internal analysis showed that more than half of the transportation problems were related to commercial airlines or airports. Of those, two-thirds were caused by weather delays, mechanical delays and flight cancellations.

About one-third of transportation problems were related to logistics providers or ground couriers, mostly delays of package pickups. The rest were related to the sender or receiver of the shipments. The most common issue was the package not being ready for pickup at the designated time.

However, Brown said, poor outcomes can’t be blamed directly on transportation problems, even when they do occur.

“The delay could be the primary reason an organ wasn’t transplanted,” he said. “It could be a contributing factor or it could have nothing to do with the reason that the organ is not transplanted.”

Other transplant experts downplay the impact of transportation problems. Kelly Ranum, president of the Association of Organ Procurement Organizations, said she’s “surprised at how low” UNOS’ failure numbers are, considering the volume of kidneys shipped.

Nearly 40,000 organs were transplanted in the U.S. last year, including more than 23,000 kidneys.(Photographer's Choice RF/Getty Images)

Dr. Kevin O’Connor, chief executive of LifeCenter Northwest, an OPO based in Seattle, said transportation problems are “minimal” compared with the other reasons organs — including about 3,500 donated kidneys — are discarded each year. These typically include biopsy findings, the inability to find a recipient and poor organ function.

“For over 30 years and literally tens of thousands of organs being transported,” he said, “I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times that, because of a transportation glitch, an organ was ultimately not transplanted.”

Still, O’Connor acknowledged that “even one kidney being thrown away because of transportation errors is unacceptable.”

Part of the problem lies with the way organs are transported now, said Axelrod, who also represents the American Society of Transplant Surgeons.

“We don’t have an end-to-end unified transportation system,” Axelrod said. “We don’t have a FedEx for transplant. We have a cobbled-together system of OPOs and couriers and private aircraft and commercial aircraft.”

In recent years, several courier companies have emerged to meet the market for transplant organs. Don Jones, chief executive of the Nationwide Organ Recovery Transport Alliance, or NORA, contracts with more than 15 OPOs and oversees about 400 organs a year on commercial flights.

“I would say 99.8% of our transports on commercial airlines go perfectly fine,” Jones said based on his estimate. Jones noted that his firm ships organs only on direct flights and uses GPS tracking to monitor them.

However, GPS tracking isn’t universal — or required by UNOS or HRSA. Some couriers and airlines use it; many don’t. Many OPOs monitor organs through a combination of verbal handoffs, automation and label scans, Brown said.

In Ginny McBride’s misadventure last fall, she contracted with a courier, Sterling Global Aviation Logistics, which used Delta Air Lines to ship the kidney.

Delta uses GPS trackers on its Dash Critical shipments, promising fast, guaranteed delivery of human organs. But on that night in October, the kidney was shipped from Orlando to Atlanta without a GPS tracker. In Atlanta, a cargo worker couldn’t find a GPS device to put on the box containing the kidney, so the worker held the organ for a later flight. That would have pushed it far beyond the window of viability.

An internal Delta report, obtained by McBride, found that Delta didn’t have enough GPS devices available in Atlanta that night. “Destination stations are not returning the devices in a timely manner,” according to the report. “One way to mitigate this from reoccurring is to have a larger inventory of GPS devises (sic) at each station.”

Delta declined to comment on the report.

The average wait time for a kidney varies widely nationwide, from less than three years to more than a decade. One proposal to put more organs to use called for eliminating the 58 donation service areas and 11 regions now used to allocate kidneys and replacing them with a zone of up to 500 nautical miles from the donor hospital.

In December, OPTN cut that range in half — to 250 nautical miles — in part because of an outcry about problems shipping kidneys via commercial air.

“There are certainly no technological barriers to doing GPS and to actually requiring it,” Brown said.

A UNOS committee is considering whether to collect data on transportation methods and outcomes, but, so far, the question remains under review.

“If the community wants it, they should ask for it,” Brown said. “We can help facilitate and get it done for them.”

McBride, who discussed solutions with her colleagues, hopes the transplant organizations will come together to solve transportation problems, to make sure every eligible donated kidney gets transplanted.

“Any organ that’s wasted, in my opinion, is a loss to the patient and to the community,” said Paul Conway, of the American Association of Kidney Patients, an advocacy group, who is himself a kidney recipient. “With all of the advances going on with drugs, with medical procedures, how can you have a logistics error be the barrier?”

This investigation and a related podcast represent a collaboration between Kaiser Health News and Reveal, from The Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR), a nonprofit news organization. Reveal, from CIR and PRX, is a nationally broadcast public radio show and investigative reporting podcast. Kaiser Health News (KHN) is a nonprofit news service covering health issues. It is an editorially independent program of the Kaiser Family Foundation that is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.

How Lifesaving Organs For Transplant Go Missing In Transit published first on https://nootropicspowdersupplier.tumblr.com/

[orbemnews]

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