Welcome to my life's mission
Hi, I'm a commercial-rated pilot and in 2025, 96% of my piloting hours was flying my two planes for 501c3 Volunteer Pilot Organizations (VPOs), primarily Angel Flights and Pilots n Paws. In 2024 I was honored to be both the Angel Flight East Pilot of the Year and the Angel Flight Mid Atlantic Single Engine Pilot of the year, and also received the American Navion Society Humanitarian Award.
2025: Completed 130 people missions for 225 patients and passengers, and transported 906 animals on 71 missions. Flew a total of 1,165 hours, with 1,118 of them for community benefit missions.
Angel flights and similar orgs provide free transportation to get people to where they need to be for medical or social care, such as ambulatory patients to healthcare, vets and their serviced dogs for training and retreats, and human traffic victims to safe houses. Often these flights are from rural areas where other modes of transportation are simply too expensive or even unavailable, and often to seek treatment with a specialist who is hundreds of miles away, sometimes as frequently as once a week. Some patients are immunocompromised, or need to bring significant amount of medical supplies, or especially in the case of children, must travel with one or more parents, grandparents, or siblings. Treatement protocols can last for months, years, or even a lifetime.
Animal rescue is free transportation to move pets from high-kill shelters to fosters and rescue organizations, often just days or even hours before they are scheduled to be euthanized. Sadly, hundreds of thousands of pets are unnecessarily euthanized every year, and the goal is to move as many as possilbe, such as the pups above that were scheduled to be killed.
The organizations I fly for include Seuks Army, Pilots N' Paws, Angel Flight Mid Atlantic, Angel Flight East, Angel Flight Northeast, Lifeline PIlots, Elevated Access, and PALS Skyhope, and dozens of local animal rescue organizations.
Pilots who fly these missions absorb all of the costs of plane ownership, maintenance, insurance, hangers, landing fees, database subscriptions, training, etc.
When I started flying these flights in 2021, I began to post missions on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/kley.parkhurst/), mostly to try to recruit other pilots as I couldn't quite believe the amount of joy it brought me to help people and save dogs.
With time, a few friends asked "who pays for this?", I answered "I do", and they asked "how can we help?".
UPDATE: The FAA has put the hammer down on volunteer pilot organizations, basically, by over-regulating a 2012 Congressional mandate that was intended to give charitable piloting organizations a way to reimburse fuel. They created a set of regulations that are based on commercial charter operations (Part 135) instead of Part 91 (private pilots). These regulations are just too burdensome and costly to administer, assuming, of course, that they can even be correctly interpreted to the satisfaction of the FAA.
Wings of Mercy has filed suit against the FAA in conjunction with a another non-profit. Hopefully this will get resolved, but in the meantime there is no VPO that reimburses fuel. https://www.texaspolicy.com/press/tppf-files-two-cases-challenging-faa-restrictions-on-volunteer-pilots.
Ironically, the regulations only pertain to the reimbursement of fuel; it is still possible to conduct the exact same flight without the fuel waivers in place. Thus, thse regulations do nothing to increase the safety of passengers.
At the end of the day, the biggest impact is to passengers, who won't have as many pilots able to fly them as before. The shortage is made worse by the cost of AvGas and jetA being north of $7.00 per gallon.
Feel free to contact me directly if you have any ideas, but unfortunately my voluminous flying days are going to be on pause for awhile.
Please consider making donations to the Angel Flight organization in your area, to support their mission.
Recap on my 2024 missions on Facebook. 2024 Photos.
I'd be happy to answer any questions you have, please contact me a call at 703-675-0753 or kleyp@yahoo.com.
Thank you!