Thank you to Stefan Holt and Sandra Torres with5 NBC Chicago for their interest in reporting this story and for holding extra passengers on your laps!

Seven thousand feet over Central Illinois, a chocolate lab puppy rests its head on the shoulder of pilot Pete Tobin, seemingly lulled to sleep by the hum of the plane’s engine.

“On every rescue there’s about one dog that stands out,” Pete says through the headset, “one that makes it special and makes it all worth it. This little guy is the most special one on this trip.”

Pilot Pete and one of his special passengers

Just hours ago, this special little guy was in line to be euthanized at the Wayne County Humane Society. Instead he and 16 other dogs, plus six cats, were taken to the Fairfield Municipal Airport, where they were loaded into the back of a small, single-engine Columbia 350. A plane that normally seats four humans is now flying 22 strayed, orphaned and unwanted animals to Chicago on a flight path towards a brighter future.

Pete and his wife, Karen Johnson, are part of a growing corps of aviators who volunteer their weekends and their personal planes to support rescue flights posted on an Internet forum called Pilots N Paws.

Pilots Pete Tobin and Karen Johnson

The organization was founded in 2008 and serves as an online meeting place for animal rescue groups to coordinate with more than 2,500 general aviation pilots willing to use their personal airplanes to transport shelter animals to towns where they could be adopted.

According to Pilots N Paws, more than 4 million unwanted pets are euthanized each year because of overcrowded and underfunded shelters in mainly rural locations. The pilots are able to save these animals by flying them to no-kill shelters or to adoptive families, often located hundreds of miles away. The pilots spend their own money to pay for the flight, which in the case of a Columbia 350, costs $400-plus for a tank of gas.

“I’ll take as many as we can,” says Karen, who spends her day job working as the president of a concrete cutting business based out of Morton Grove. “The alternative is they drown them, they take them out back and shoot them if it’s a puppy mill, and if it’s animal control they just euthanize them.”

"Can we fly the plane please?" (photo credit 5 NBC)

For many of these animals, a rescue flight is their only chance of survival.

“Once you get in the air they mellow out quite a bit,” says Pete as he glances back at two puppies sleeping in the back seat. The Glenview couple says they stopped counting once they reached 50 animals carried aboard their plane on trips across the Midwest and the East Coast. But the record for most in one flight was on this day when 22 animals flew from Fairfield to Chicago.

All 22 pups and kitties headed to happy lives!

A pair of beagles sit in one crate, while another contains a mother West Highland Terrier and her four babies. Only one dog was unable to fit safely aboard and had to be left on the ground to wait for a truck to carry him on the five-hour journey north.

“Sometimes it’s so stressful,” Karen says about carrying the animals by truck. “They’ve had animals die being transported from Tennessee all the way to Chicago because it’s so much stress and so many more hours on the ground.” The rest of the pets enjoyed a smooth one-and-a-half hour flight.

Stefan Holt with his own very special passenger! (photo credit 5 NBC)

After the Columbia 350 gracefully touches down at Chicago Executive, Pete taxis the aircraft alongside a van marked ARFMOBILE, where volunteers from Animal Rescue Foundation – Illinois are waiting to pick up the precious cargo. One by one, the cats and dogs emerge from the plane. Their next stop is the no-kill shelter where they are spayed or neutered before being put up for adoption.

Ann and Joanne of A.R.F. took delivery of their new charges:

“They don t know that they need to be happy,” says ARF Illinois President Ann Persenaire, carrying a crate full of cats off the airplane. “They don’t know that life’s gotten good.”

If you would like to support these organizations, or adopt one of the animals, go to the following sites:

Animal Rescue Foundation of Illinois
Wayne County Humane Society
Pilots N Paws

Source: http://www.nbcchicago.com/news/local/Pilots-To-The-Rescue-150744095.html#ixzz1uNJLjW00

Please like Stefan Holt and 5NBC Chicago on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/nbcchicago

Follow Stefan Holt on Twitter: Stefan Holt @nbcstefholt

Partners Subaru and Petmate, thanks for supporting Pilots N Paws!

Todd next to his Cessna 421 and the cats on board. Meow.

The situation for many pets in Egypt is very difficult. There are no government laws regulating animal welfare. Many people buy pets from deplorable pet shops and then dump them in the street or vet office when they no longer want them. Purebred Persian cats cannot survive in the street against the feral street cats because the Persians have had their survival instinct bred out of them. Paul was one cat who came over from Egypt to the USA. He was in a very bad pet shop and the owner of the shop was using the cats for breeding. The pet shop kept him in a bird cage and only fed him bread and water. When Paul became sick, the owner threw him in the street. A kind Egyptian lady who lives on the same street saw him and took him in. Bousy, Chloe, and Lilly are the three other cats who flew on Todd’s plane to AZ. They were all abandoned by owners who left them to die.

We thank our partners Subaru and Petmate.   Their support is critical to accomplishing our mission.

A very furry welcoming committee.

Pilot Todd Underwood just made an unusual life saving flight for The Egyptian Society for Mercy to Animals (ESMA)  to AJ’s Best Friends.  What’s so unusual about this rescue flight is all 6 cats were rescued from horrible abusive lives in Cairo, Egypt.  Unlike the U.S. and many other countries, there are no animal laws in Egypt and the situation for domestic animals is dire.  People buy them from overcrowded and cruel pet shops, they keep them for a few weeks, and then throw them out in the trash or the street.  They treat them like disposable toys.  The only animal control there is by the government who puts out poison or goes on shooting sprees.

Thanks Todd!

Fortunately, there are some very kind Egyptian volunteers who dedicate their time to rescuing these animals from their horrible situations.  But, since there are so few volunteers, the make-shift shelter there has over 600 animals.  There is no culture of adoption, so the animals just sit there their whole life (which is short because they catch illnesses from one another).  As the Egyptian volunteers work to build a better animal culture in Egypt, they don’t want to let the animals in the shelter have a horrible life.  So they have found shelters abroad that take them and find them forever homes.  We have sent animals to Europe and also to the USA (Milwaukee, SF, San Diego, etc).

The problem is that sending the cats to the USA on cargo is prohibitively expensive.  It is much cheaper if we can find a person flying from Cairo to USA so the animal can fly on their ticket, with them serving as flying parents.  In this case, we had a woman who agreed to take 6 cats to Las Vegas. The shelter is in Phoenix.  Luckily, Pilots N Paws helped us transfer the cats in the last leg of their long journey to safety.

Heidi Morrison
US rep for Egyptian Society for Mercy for Animals
morrisonheidi@gmail.com

AJ’s Best Friends contact info is ajbfcats@gmail.com

Thanks, Beth in Bainbridge for getting everything in check for this FREEDOM flight! We ALWAYS appreciate the pilots that fly to help shelter animals get second chances! And to the rescues that take them in! Check out the Cat Rescue and adopt an animal!

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Pilot Jim Carney, better known to some of us in rescue as “Uncle Jim” flew 2 dogs and 6 cats from TN to KY.

Thank you Jim and to the rescues involved in saving these 8 animals!

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Pilots N Paws pilots moved 52 animals (45 dogs and 7 cats) out of rural southern Georgia to Florida today in one trip. Aren’t they awesome? Just wanted you to know that this amazing program saves so many animals from certain death. Besides those, I also had another pilot that brought a Boxer mama and her 8 pups that were only 2 weeks old from a kill shelter to a waiting rescue in Florida. A good day’s work, if I do say so! Thanks to everyone for helping! Sue Bruce