This week we are joined by Russ Keith, the executive director of Operation Airdrop. Hear the fascinating story of the work their pilots did recently providing relief to victims of the Texas Hill Country flooding.
Check out more from Operation Airdrop here -- https://www.operationairdrop.org
00:01
Behind the Prop Intro
Clear prop S73 Cherokee number two falling Flint traffic three mile final one trolley bravo makesford in Runway two five going four mile.
00:10
Nick Alan
This is behind the prop with United Flight Systems owner and licensed pilot Bobby Doss and his co host, major airline captain and designated pilot examiner Wally Mulhern. Now let's go behind the prop.
00:23
Bobby Doss
What's up Wally?
00:25
Wally Mulhearn
Hey Bobby, how are you?
00:27
Bobby Doss
I am fantastic as always. If you live anywhere in the world, you have been hearing about the catastrophes and rain and all the bad that's been happening in the central to south central part of Texas. Lots of flash flooding and there's been a lot of great people that have responded to that flash flooding. And we've been lucky enough to have a group that coordinated a bunch of flights from my flight school in the lower part of Texas. Operation Airdrop is the show this week on behind the prop and we have with us Russ Keith. He is the executive director of Operation Airdrop. Russ, thanks for joining the show.
01:08
Russ Keith
Hey, thanks for having me on.
01:11
Bobby Doss
So one of my pilots reached out day before yesterday, maybe three days ago and said, hey, I just flew a mission for Operation Airdrop. You guys have to have them on the show. Great story, great mission, great work that they're doing. I was way out of Texas when all of the rain happened and it was very disheartening. Many of my friends have been touched by the disaster. Russ, tell us just the background story of how Operation Airdrop came together and how you have such a response to a big disaster like what's happened in the hill country.
01:45
Russ Keith
So Operation Airdrop started almost accidentally. Gentleman by the name of Doug Jackson. He owned a trailer company at the time when Hurricane Harvey hit Houston in 2017. And so heard they needed some supplies down there. So he loaded up a trailer, went down there with a buddy and got down there and realized they couldn't get the supplies to where they needed it. Being pilots, they all went back home, got their airplanes, flew down at a and I don't remember now off top of my head which airport they went to, but they set up at an airport and then loaded all those supplies in their airplanes and flew them where they need to be. That was successful. So he put out a social media post saying, hey, you know, can any guys come down and help?
02:35
Russ Keith
And there was a number of airplanes that flew down, they'd loaded up and when it was all said and done, they moved, you know, several tens of thousands of pounds of supplies into the areas that needed them. Supplies like water, food, Diapers, just your basic humanitarian needs, that sort of thing. So he got in, was asked to do a. I don't know if it was a podcast or an interview of some sort. And they asked him and said, well, what's the name of your organization? Which didn't really have a name at the time. So it just popped in his head, Operation Airdrop. So he got back and he was camping out on a riverbank because he's a, you know, a backwoods pilot. And his buddy said, you know, you need to start an organization. So he's like, yeah, I think you do.
03:35
Russ Keith
I think you're right. I do. So he incorporated, got the 501C3 set up, and the rest is kind of history. Fast forward to October 2024 when Hurricane Elaine basically destroyed North Carolina. You know, the western portion part of North Carolina, up in the mountains. That was Operation Airdrops 1515 Hurricane, their 15th deployment. And then I got a call from a member of ARC in Marble Falls, and the emergency manager of Burnett county was looking for someone to coordinate supplies. Well, this person happened to know a little bit about Operation Airdrop, so they called me and asked me if we could help. So I jumped in my truck, drove down to Burnett, the airport. While on the way down there, I was talking to the airport manager who said, yeah, we get you a hangar.
04:46
Russ Keith
And then when we got down there, she set me up with the caf Museum and they opened up their big hangar. And then we operated out of the caf Museum building there at the Burnett airport all week. And we had 104 aircraft fly in and we delivered a little over £80,000 of supplies over the course of the week.
05:16
Bobby Doss
One of my guys said that he flew over there and brought a, I think he said 500 worth of powdered Gatorade, which I was kind of shocked, but that makes a lot of sense. You don't want a small plane full of liquid. That's going to be a waste of how much cargo you can bring. What were the ask, what did they want when they asked for help?
05:34
Russ Keith
Although small planes. But the, the people that were out searching and there's still 104 people missing.
05:46
Bobby Doss
That's terrible.
05:47
Russ Keith
And there's, there's still 104 people missing. And so there's literally a couple of thousand people combing the creeks, cutting up the trees, getting all the debris out of the way, looking under, ever incredible trying to find these individuals that are missing. And it's hot, obviously it's a harvest In Tech or July in Texas and humid and all those relief workers, first responders in those creeks are all cramping up.
06:30
Bobby Doss
Yeah, that's a tough call for those guys and girls that are out there looking. I've seen some horrific pictures of them discovering people. And at this point, obviously if they're on this mission still and they're looking for people, it's not very likely that 13 days later they're going to be in good shape. So fingers crossed for everybody. And mission still going on. And that's kind of something that happens that probably Operation Airdrop doesn't lose sight of. The mission still continues, right? The news has kind of died down. The news isn't talking about it, but there's still a need. How do, how do people get involved with Operation Airdrop? And, and kind of holistically, what are your requirements? What do you all hope for? How do you, how do pilots get involved?
07:20
Russ Keith
So it's really simple. All you have to do is go to operation error.org and hit the volunteer and it'll ask you for your information. It'll put you on our email list and the next time we get ready to activate, you'll start getting emails about where to go, what we're going to do, and you can start making your plans on how you're going to be involved, whether that's as a pilot or as a ground volunteer, because we need both. There's no question about it. We get into a hurricane situation, we may have 75 to 100 people working in the hangar doing various jobs. Because if you think about it, when someone comes in with a car load or a truckload or a trailer load of supplies, each of those items has to be weighed, then it has to be sorted and then set on pallets.
08:22
Russ Keith
And then the knee comes in and a pilot says, I can take £400. Then we're going to build a £400 pallet with the items for that particular location in which they're going to fly to. So they'll say, well, like for instance, I made a mission to, I flew a mission to Asheville, North Carolina from Concord. And so they knew the supplies that Asheville had requested and so they just created the pallet. And I put as much of this in my airplane as I could possibly fit and then flew out there and dropped it off. So we need people on the receiving side in those hangars.
09:10
Russ Keith
A lot of times that is a local church or the fire department, they'll help coordinate folks that we call catchers that, you know, catch the supplies coming into the cutoff area and then they'll sort it and set it up in a hangar at that airport so that the people that need it can either get it or sometimes there's other folks that take it to where it needs to go. So it's quite an orchestration of logistics, but it all comes together and seems to work very well.
09:46
Bobby Doss
Yeah, that's a great point. And honestly I didn't think about it from that perspective because I'm the host of an aviation podcast. But there's probably more people needed on the ground to help move and provide support and logistics for the supplies coming in than necessarily there is pilots and planes. But we are an aviation podcast. Let's talk about the piles and planes. Like what kind of pilots and planes are you looking for? Like if I look at your website, there's a, Looks like an old DC3. I mean, you're not just looking for big planes, are you?
10:19
Russ Keith
No, not at all. In fact, the biggest majority of the planes that fly are, I'd say Cherokees and 172s, 182s, lots of Cherokees, lots of 182s, lots of 172s, lots. Every once in a while you'll get a 150, 152 in. We get, you know, two seater RVs come in. It, you know, it all adds up. So anybody that's willing to take a load from point A to point B, we're certainly not going to discourage or turn down unless there's some extenuated circumstances that is out of the norm. But usually there's plenty of flying to do. So come on.
11:09
Bobby Doss
Yeah, us pilots, we look for any excuse. I mean, crap, we spend a hundred dollars on a hamburger not eight miles from our house if we get the opportunity. So no reason. I think Wally's about to close on a really fast Cessna120 that he'll bring you a roll of paper towels next time you need them somewhere. Wherever you are, it might take him a few days to get there. Single ply paper towels might take him a few days to get there, but that's the kind of flying he enjoys doing for sure. In the past we've had a few other volunteer organizations on the show and sometimes it requires a commercial certificate to register, maybe an instrument rating. What, what are your minimum requirements for a pilot that wants to get involved?
11:54
Russ Keith
Private pilot.
11:56
Bobby Doss
That's so cool. Many Many private pilots, Wally and I live in this world of flight training. Private pilot passes their checkride with Wally tomorrow they want to start their instrument rating. That's not normally the best thing. We, Wally and I don't agree that's normally the best track. They need to find some way to use that new certificate and as we say, learn how to actually fly. Sounds like a great opportunity for people to do really cool mission based flying. And it's, and as we've said, it's not all in Texas. You guys might have started in Texas but there's a lot of opportunity to fly cool missions. How do people get signed up if they want to be able to help your organization?
12:38
Russ Keith
And that's the easy part. You just go to operationairdrop.org scroll down towards the bottom. There is a fly with us button or there is a volunteer button and they can click on either one of those. It'll, they can, you know, give us their information. We'll put them in the email chain so the next time we activate they'll start getting an email about where we're going and what we're going to do.
13:11
Bobby Doss
That's fantastic. So if you're out there listening, you definitely should go volunteer or sign up if you're a pilot to help this organization. I've been impressed with the response from other fellow Texans. We live in the south. It seems like we do good at responding to this type of stuff. What do you think people don't understand about this disaster, Russ? That they should understand whether it's about the mission or whether it's about the catastrophe. What do you think? We don't know when weren't close to it.
13:43
Russ Keith
Well, one thing, there's still 104 people missing. That number's come down really not a lot. I mean it was up around 150, 160 and the death toll is now, you know, well over 100 as well. So it was pretty bad. There was a, basically a cyclone. It's, it's the remnants of Tropical storm Barry is what it was. And it centered over lampastas and just circulated for a couple of days and just dumped water. Very similar to what happened in hurricane Harvey in Houston. It's not much different at all. And of course they've been having quite a bit of rain down there. So the creeks and rivers were in the leading land leading up to those creeks and river was already saturated so there was no place for the water to go but into the creek.
14:44
Russ Keith
So we had creeks that rose very quickly, you know, 30, 35ft. And then of course the bad news is that up and down that creek is, you know, on a holiday weekend is all these campers enjoying the river or the view of the river, the Guadalupe and the summer camps where all the kids were. And unfortunately one of the Camp mystic there was a couple of cabins that floated away with kids in them.
15:19
Bobby Doss
Man, that's hard to watch too. And unfortunately with social media nowadays, you get to see all those videos. It's devastating, the destruction. And those people that don't live maybe in Texas or South Texas don't understand how this can happen. Right. I think people that live in mountainous terrain and they have valleys and the way the water runs off Texas is so flat that even when we say river, we're probably talking in forms of creeks to the rest of the country. And that creek has probably a 400 foot bank on either side of it because it's just flat, it's not much there. And as all this water accumulates and falls, it's just a runaway. It's a, it's a tsunami. It really is a tsunami.
16:05
Russ Keith
And yeah, that's in the Texas hill country. And a lot of those rivers, they, you know, through the years they've cut down through the limestone and so you've got sheer canyon walls on either side. So when all that water starts coming in there, all it does is accumulate. It goes up pretty fast because it can't spread out. And that's why it got so deep so fast, because of the amount of rain that was falling at the time. And it was just unrelentless. The, the rain just kept coming and coming. The, the mass flooding started July 4th. I was actually in Boston to see the fireworks and then we started monitoring it. And then July 5th, I jumped on a plane in Boston and flew home to Louisville, Texas, where I live.
16:59
Russ Keith
And then I got up at 3 in the morning, jumped in my truck and drove down to burn it. Got there at 7 o' clock and started the operation. Of course it was still pouring down rain, so that was Sunday. And then I think we had four airplanes fly in IFR that day and dropped off supplies in the pouring down rain. And then the next day, Monday, it was still raining. And I think we had seven airplanes fly in IFR and dropped off supplies. And then the next day, of course the sun came out and you know, the flood, the floodgate opened up, as you say, for the airplanes and they really started flying in. It was hard to kind of keep track and catch up. Because we had four or five airplanes on the ramp at all times.
17:51
Russ Keith
As soon, as soon as a wave of planes would leave, another wave with planes would come in. And it was just an amazing scene. But, you know, we talked about it earlier that, you know, pilots are just looking for a reason to fly. And if you give them a really good reason, they like it even more. So, you know, you call out, say, I need these very specific things. They'll go to the hardware store or Walmart or Lowe's and, you know, they'll buy them and they'll put it in their plane or in some places they set up collections and they put out to their network. We're collecting for, you know, the hill country floods. These are the things they're asking for.
18:42
Russ Keith
Bring them to our flight school, our airport, you know, my hangar, my house, and we'll put them in airplane and fly them down. And so we wound up with collection place all over Texas, and not just Texas. We had planes flying from Louisiana, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Wisconsin and Chicago that I know of.
19:03
Bobby Doss
Wow.
19:04
Russ Keith
Was it just Texas? It was, it was all over. And for the most part, people looked at the list they brought.
19:17
Bobby Doss
Sorry, I have people all over the world that I work with and there are people that literally around the world were aware of this catastrophe and wanted to figure out how they could help. I'm, I'm not, I don't know. I'm not the expert on donations, but I'm not so sure. Just giving money always is the best bet. I like this grassroots support and getting the material timely to someone. Money doesn't solve all problems. I think these specific requests are very key.
19:45
Russ Keith
They are. But we had quite a few people that weren't able to fly down, that weren't able to put together supplies, so they went to operation Airdrop.
19:54
Bobby Doss
We lost you for just a second. But I did notice that on your website that someone can donate money right at the very top. Donate to Texas Flood Relief is there. And again, I think I would say it's much better to give money to a local organization like this than some big concord corporate conglomerate that's going to spread that money out and pay for a bunch of overhead. I assume there's that all this was volunteer, freely given to the, the cause, and none of it was exploited in any way. I saw a ton of posts on social media about donating and giving, and it is just an important thing for sure.
20:37
Russ Keith
And we've spent about 11,000 more for the audience for this particular Mission.
20:46
Bobby Doss
Wow. So you definitely need money. You got to have people that run your organization, and that's going to be a key part of it for sure. And right on your homepage, you can click the donate button and donate to your overall organization, or you can donate to the Texas flood relief, and I'm assuming that money would go right to that flood relief as well. Anything else you want to share to the listeners, to how they can get involved or how they can contribute to either this or any other, and then there's going to be a future catastrophe of some sort. Anything you'd like to share with the listeners to get involved?
21:20
Russ Keith
I, I think the main thing would be to just prepare, you know, if you really want to come down and help, think about how you're going to get there if you're, you know, if you're not a pilot, because not everybody is, and you know, what you're. You're willing and capable of doing. You know, it is. We're coming up on the height of hurricane season. The National Hurricane, or the National Weather Service is predicting some pretty significant hurricane activity this fall. So there's. I doubt there's much question that we're not going to deploy to another major hurricane this year as well. We certainly work through some of the issues that we saw with this particular flood, so I can certainly see us helping out in future floods, too. Around the country, frankly, we tried to help in Kentucky.
22:24
Russ Keith
I was talking to the emergency managers up there, and I feel like we failed miserably because we didn't utilize the aircraft in the flying community. We took the money that was donated and I bought supplies through Amazon thinking it was going to get there in a day or two. And some of it did get there. For what happened in these situations is the supply chain dries up pretty quick. So you think there might be quite a bit of this out there. You know, the things that are needed. We. You, you know, you got to go far and wide to get what you need. And so it takes the aviation community to pull that off. So had I set up in an airport in Kentucky and said, guys, this is what we need. This is where I'm at. Fly in and drop it off.
23:21
Russ Keith
We would have had the same success that we did in burn it.
23:30
Bobby Doss
Yeah, it was last year that we had a hurricane or something, I guess it might have been. I don't remember what the hurricane was or the storm was last year, but I lost power for four or five days, and, man, it was tough. You couldn't get gas for your cars. I had to. I mean we couldn't find, you know, zero generators like that. You say it dries up quick. That supply chain goes instantly probably for sure. Well, to your original founder slash idea guy who came up with a great name, Doug Jackson. And you, Russ, Keith and everybody at Operation Airdrop. We appreciate all that you do. This was a story that will probably never leave our minds in Houston, Texas and all the surrounding areas in the hill country that have been devastated and families touched and many lives lost.
24:28
Bobby Doss
We appreciate you and what you do. If you have any means, please take time to donate to Operation Airdrop and everything that they've done for their current 15 missions and hopefully great success in future. 15 missions. Reminder that Wally and Bobby will be at Oshkosh next week. We're going to post some stuff about where you can come meet us and talk to us. We'll do a few meet and greets on Tuesday, Wednesday.
24:53
Russ Keith
One more thing. Operation Airdrop will have a booth at Oshkosh in Hangar B. So come by.
25:00
Bobby Doss
All right. Well, we will come. I will make sure I come by and see you and take a few pictures and we'll post them on our social media as well. And I see. Are you there all week or what days are you going to be there?
25:11
Russ Keith
I'll be there all week. In fact, I'll be camping out in American Legend Cubs booth right across the street from the plaza.
25:19
Bobby Doss
Well, I will make sure I come see for sure. And as always, everyone else stay behind the Prop.
25:26
Nick Alan
Thanks for checking out the behind the Prop podcast. Be sure to click subscribe and check us out online@bravetheprop.com behind the Prop is recorded in Houston, Texas. Creator and host is Bobby Doss. Co host is Wally Mulhern. The show is for entertainment purposes only and is not meant to replace actual flight instruction. Thanks for listening and remember, fly safe.