Ready For Takeoff - Turn Your Aviation Passion Into A Career

Five thousand feet up, pilots are flying some very important cargo across the country. It’s not people or packages these men and women have loaded into the back of their planes: It’s puppies – squirmy, soft and sometimes sad homeless animals who need a new leash on life. In recent years, rescue-pilot programs have taken off in the South and Northeast. Pilots, almost all of them volunteers who give their time and money to the cause on the weekends, shepherd homeless animals from high-kill shelters in states where adoption rates are usually low, like Alabama and South Carolina, and fly them miles away to animal rescues in the northeast or Central Florida. The animals, many of them young dogs, are adopted or fostered in places where more people are looking to find a furry friend to take home.click to enlarge Given their wings and the selfless mission to save lives, it might seem apt to compare these pilots to angels. But Michael Young, an Orlando rescue pilot who’s been transporting dogs via plane for the past s