Altus Airmen Deliver Aid for Haitian Children

Members of the 97th Air Mobility Wing at Altus AFB, Okla., brought 137,000 pounds of food on a C-17 to Port-au-Prince, Haiti, last week, completing the largest single-day delivery of humanitarian supplies to the Caribbean nation since 1998, according to unit officials. “We offloaded more than 130,000 pounds of food that will be delivered to orphanages in Haiti,” said Maj. Jody Turk, 730th Air Mobility Training Squadron assistant director of operations, of the Dec. 28 mission in Altus’ release on the following day. The C-17’s cargo of rice and beans is expected to feed thousands of Haitian children for about a month, states the release. The non-profit aid organization Operation Ukraine oversees this food assistance. The delivery occurred under the auspices of the Denton program, a joint Pentagon-State Department-US AID initiative that enables humanitarian shipments on Air Force airplanes on a space-available basis. “Without the US Air Force, there would have been thousands of kids that would have died,” said Kathy Cadden, Operation Ukraine founder and president. (Altus report by SrA. Kenneth W. Norman)