Eyes were riveted to television screens on Aug. 2, 2014, as the nation watched medical missionary Dr. Kent Brantly, dressed head-to-toe in white protective gear, emerge from the back of an ambulance and shuffle into Emory University Hospital.
Infected by the communicable Ebola virus while treating patients in Liberia, Brantly became the first person in the U.S. to have the disease and one of the first to survive it, along with his colleague and aid worker Nancy Writebol, who arrived three days later.
Both have shared their stories of survival in multiple interviews and news articles, including a memoir Brantly and his wife Amber wrote titled “Called for Life.”
But the incredible story of how Brantly and Writebol got from Liberia to Atlanta — despite the groundswell of effort to prevent it — has never been told before. That is, until the March publication of “No One’s Coming” (Grand Central Publishing, $30) by Kevin Hazzard, a former EMS provider for Atlanta’s Grady Hospital and author of “1000 Naked Strangers: A Paramedic’s Wild Ride to the Edge and Back.”
Credit: Grand Central Publishing
Credit: Grand Central Publishing
“No One’s Coming” is Hazzard’s nail-biting account of the life-and-death race to save two extremely sick, contagious people. It focuses on three key organizations — Emory University Hospital, the CDC and Phoenix Air aviation service in Cartersville — and illustrates what happens when skill, luck and advance planningconverge.
Mission of mercy
Spread through blood or body fluids, as well as contaminated objects and surfaces, Ebola is a horrific disease with a high fatality rate that ravages the kidneys and liver.
When an outbreak occurred in West Africa in 2014, eventually resulting in 15,227 cases and 11,310 deaths, the Christian humanitarian aid organization Samaritan’s Purse provided much-needed health care.
Despite precautions, two of its missionaries, Brantly and Writebol, contracted the disease and death seemed imminent. Their best chance of survival was to be transported back to the United States for treatment.
Enter Phoenix Air.
Established in the late ‘70s by Mark Thompson, a Northside High School graduate who flew helicopters for the U.S. Army, the company had two propeller planes and six employees with the mission of transporting cargo, mostly car parts.
Credit: Phoenix Air
Credit: Phoenix Air
Then Thompson’s brother Dent joined the operation in the mid-‘80s, bringing with him organizational and communication skills he’d honed from 13 years of working for Disney World.
Together they grew the company by expanding their services into hazardous cargo including explosives, animal transport and air ambulance. Today they have 350 employees, 40 jet aircraft and offices around the world.
“No One’s Coming” recounts in gripping detail some of the outrageously dangerous missions the company has executed over the years, and it paints a colorful portrait of the brothers, who couldn’t be more different.
“They’re like something out of Mark Twain,” said Hazzard, 48, of Morningside. “They are complete opposites. … One is tall, one is short. One can’t stop talking and one never talks. One is always flying somewhere across the world, the other one is always working the phones. They’re a really eccentric yin-yang. They are these crazy, crazy characters who started this strange company that could not function without either one of them.”
But when it comes to transporting sensitive cargo, the Thompson brothers are all business.
Managing risk and biocontainment
In 2007, the CDC asked Phoenix Air to develop a biocontainment system that could be put inside an aircraft so if their employees got sick overseas, they could be transported to Emory University Hospital, which was developing an infectious disease treatment unit.
Credit: Phoenix Air
Credit: Phoenix Air
“What they told us is this,” said Dent Thompson, 76, of Buckhead. “They said there are three diseases (SARS, avian flu and swine flu) that have broken out in Indonesia and other places and our medical staff here are resisting going there because if they inadvertently catch one of those diseases, there is no way to get them back to the United States for treatment. They’ll be stuck overseas and they could die overseas.”
It took five years and millions of dollars, funded in part by the CDC, the U.S. Department of Defense and Phoenix Air, to develop the Aeromedical Biological Containment System (ABCS) featuring a contained air filtration system. The trio of diseases that prompted the system’s invention had long since waned, but a couple of years later, when Ebola struck, it was put to use for the first time.
With the biocontainment system and Emory’s infectious disease treatment unit in place, the next step in bringing Brantly and Writebol home was staffing the flights with pilots and medical personnel who would be risking their lives in the process. It speaks to the character of Phoenix Air’s employees that there was no shortage of volunteers to staff the flights.
Credit: Bonnie J. Heath Photography
Credit: Bonnie J. Heath Photography
Hazzard said a story Dent told him about one of those volunteer pilots is what sold him on writing the book.
“One of his pilots, a guy by the name of Darrin Benton, when his family found out he was going to be flying the second Ebola flight, they threw together this sort of very last-second last supper just in case he died,” Hazzard said. “They all wanted to get together the night before he flew out. And then Darrin was the only one that didn’t make it to his last supper because he went out to meet up with a girl.
“It’s kind of funny but the stakes and the gravity and the humor was all there, and I just thought, man, that’s a good anecdote and I bet you there’s some really good stories on the other side of it. That was the moment I said I think I’d really like to tell this story.”
On the first Ebola flight carrying Brantly was Dr. Doug Olson, 53, of Alpharetta, medical director of both Phoenix Air and the emergency department at Northside Hospital Forsyth. It was the first of 11 missions he would fly with Ebola patients. And it proved to be good training for the next outbreak — COVID-19 in 2020. Phoenix Air was heavily involved in flying people out of China, Japan and Korea during the pandemic, even renting grounded 747s from commercial airlines for the task.
“We were the only people (transporting patients) for a while,” said Olson. “Nobody else in the world was comfortable flying those patients because they didn’t know what it was.”
Once the vaccine was available, Phoenix Air transported it to U.S. embassies all over the world.
Asked what attracts him and others to do such risky work, Olson said the answer is multifaceted.
“It’s doing interesting things, exciting things that maybe are on the forefront of medicine or that nobody else will do. So, there’s that excitement factor, that adrenaline rush, if you will,” he said.
“But more importantly, when it came to Ebola and COVID, we felt like we were doing the right thing to bring those who probably wouldn’t survive back for care in the United States or Europe or wherever they were going. It was a duty to serve.”
Media maelstrom breeds resistance
The logistics of flying Brantly home was complicated enough, considering his fragile medical state, the virgin run of the biocontainment system and the precautions required to prevent the spread of the disease. But then the media got wind of the operation, adding another layer of complexity.
Once word got out about the operation, there was a groundswell of resistance from people who did not want Ebola on U.S. soil. A social media firestorm blossomed into protests, death threats, and deliveries of mysterious packages from anonymous sources to hospital staff members.
The flight carrying Brantly was in the air headed to the U.S. when Thompson received word that none of Atlanta’s airports — Peachtree-DeKalb, Hartsfield-Jackson and Fulton County at Charlie Brown Field — would allow the plane to land. An 11th hour scramble ultimately secured permission to land at Dobbins Air Reserve Base in Marietta.
Ensuring the operation came off without a hitch required a tremendous amount of skill, but there was also a certain amount of luck involved, too, said Hazzard.
Credit: Phoenix Air
Credit: Phoenix Air
“From a luck standpoint, it’s kind of breathtaking. You need the weather to be just right, all the equipment had to function just right. You had to not have some sort of a major issue around all of those weird packages that are arriving, and all those protesters that are coming up,” he said.
“It would have been incredibly easy for some little thing to go wrong along the way. There were so many people involved, there were so many points where there could have been a snap in the chain. I don’t think anyone involved was sleeping very well.”
But ultimately, says Olson, hard work and preparation is what ensured a safe operation.
Credit: Doug Olson
Credit: Doug Olson
“The teamwork and the training and getting ready to go over there was paramount to how we did it safely. … It seemed like luck was involved, but there was an extraordinary amount of work from all of our departments and the State Department to make this happen,” he said.
“I felt honored to be a part of it. That’s why I volunteered. I knew it was the right thing to do. … I felt like I was called to do it, and I think a lot of us did. Fortunately, a lot of people survived because we did.”
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