Article originally published at blog.aopa.org.  To read the article directly on that website, click here.
by David Kenny, Air Safety Institute

An English setter on his way to a new home.

I was expecting it to be Reason Number 150, but the rescue group decided to juggle the passenger list, and I wound up with eight dogs and puppies rather than seven. Most were small, so I didn’t have to harness anybody in the co-pilot’s seat. A hard crate in the back seat carried a beagle mix and her two pups, still nursing; the soft crate next to it held another hound mix and a Border collie, both half grown. A soft crate in the baggage hatch was big enough for a black hound who’d served as a foster mother and two more beagle pups. By the time we’d climbed above 5,000 feet, everybody had settled down to nap.

For the second straight week, I’d had to tunnel into 40-knot headwinds all the way across West Virginia. In a 180-hp Piper Arrow, that slows things down considerably; the groundspeed readout on my GPS only occasionally showed triple digits. But heading east, it boosted us to 175 knots. The 320-nm leg from Yeager Field in Charleston to the Queen City Airport outside Allentown, Pa., actually went seven minutes faster than the 210-nm outbound leg from Frederick, Maryland, and the pups reached their foster homes by dinnertime.

I'll take this copilot any day.

I made my first rescue flight in January 2009. Not long afterwards I began using a column in my logbook to track the number of dogs I’d hauled. This latest pack brought the total to 151. Without a doubt, it’s the most rewarding flying I’ve done. I’ve landed at airports I’d never have had any other reason to visit, flown on gusty, bumpy days when it would have been easy to be lazy and stay home, and put those hard-won instrument and crosswind landing skills to practical use. I have met some of the most selfless, generous, hard-working people on the planet–people who will not let themselves be discouraged by an endless stream of unwanted animals and county shelters that can’t afford to help them. Best of all, I have pictures of 151 dogs (and counting) and the satisfaction of having given them a little help getting home.

Maybe dogs aren’t your thing. No problem! Opportunities for public-benefit flying are everywhere. Whether it’s transporting human patients on Angel Flights, training to do search-and-rescue with the CAP, carrying out environmental surveys, or giving demo flights at your airport’s open house, there’s no end of ways your airmanship can help make things better for someone else. Look around, and you’ll find plenty of reasons to fly–enough to deserve a separate column in your logbook.

David Jack Kenny is the statistician for the Air Safety Institute.