Perilous Journey: Flying Patients With Ebola From Africa to the US

This is part of a short series discussing the mission to transport American patients with Ebola from Africa to the US to receive treatment.

In July 2014, 2 American medical volunteers who were helping to treat the Ebola outbreak in West Africa became infected with the disease. As soon as the health care workers became sick, the organization that had sent them began looking for a way to get them home. In the process, they reached out to several European countries and African nations, but no one would take them into care. Countries would not even let them fly over their airspace for fear of a mechanical problem and the plane having to land in their country, potentially exposing people to the disease.

At that point, the mission changed to bringing the 2 Americans directly to the US and treating them at Emory University Hospital in Atlanta. Author Kevin Hazzard wrote about the mission in his book, No One’s Coming.

“These patients are sitting in West Africa, and really, the only option becomes the United States. They can immediately fly from Monrovia over the Atlantic and land in the US, but the problem there is just as big—the US government as a whole. President Obama was behind this, but in reality, its individual parts are all divided on whether or not this could be done…. As might be expected, a lot of people are looking around, saying, ‘Are we going to be blamed if something goes wrong?’” said Hazzard.

It is important to understand the public consciousness of this time regarding Ebola. It was several years before the COVID-19 pandemic, and Ebola was a mysterious disease that invoked great fear for good reason. Ebola has a high mortality rate and can cause patients to experience a rapid downturn once symptoms begin. Ebola has an average case fatality rate of approximately 50%, with historical rates ranging from 25% to 90%, according to the World Health Organization.¹ Mortality varies by strain, with the Zaire ebolavirus being the deadliest (up to 90% in some outbreaks) and the Sudan and Bundibugyo ebolavirus strains having lower, yet still high, mortality rates.²

And the idea of bringing home 2 Americans with a high-consequence infectious disease, via plane in a closed space for several hours, seemed an impossible task.

The Cowboy Aviators

The US government decided to conduct outreach to see whether any organization or flying unit would do it. A company called Phoenix Air decided to take on the risky mission. Together, an eclectic group of engineers, pilots, and physicians with a reputation for doing things no one else could would become the lifeline.

Phoenix Air is headquartered at Cartersville Airport, approximately 35 miles northwest of Atlanta, and was founded in the 1970s by Mark Thompson. Together, he and his brother, Dent, lead the company.

“This is an organization that had built itself around flying things that nobody else is willing to fly,” Hazzard said. “They're very proud of their cowboy background, but I think they were terrified of the fact that this is a virus that they make movies out of.

“Dent Thompson and Mark Thompson owned Phoenix Air, and they said to their medical people and their pilots, ‘This is going to be you guys on this plane, not us. So you need to decide if you're good with this.’ And to their credit, the doctors, the nurses, the pilots, they all agreed with very little hesitation to go ahead and do this mission….and even though they did not know the people on the other side of the mission, they viewed them as comrades in arms. These were people who traveled across the world and risked their lives for strangers. And that was an ethos that Phoenix Air could appreciate.”

Although they had found a group of people willing to take on the mission, they still needed a way to protect everyone on the flight. They needed a biocontainment unit that had not been constructed or through safety testing.

In the next episode, Hazzard details the design of the biocontainment tent that was placed in the plane to protect everyone on the flight from contracting Ebola.

References
1. Ebola virus disease. World Health Organization. Accessed March 23, 2026. https://www.who.int/health-topics/ebola
2. Outbreak history. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Accessed March 23, 2026. https://www.cdc.gov/ebola/outbreaks/index.html