Dog Is My Copilot: Rescue Tales of Flying Dogs, Second Chances, and the Hero Who Might Live Next Door

by Patrick Regan

  “I called all my animal-loving friends, called or sent e-mails to every rescue I could find in Nebraska, then to any that looked promising anywhere!” says Quandt, who lives in Kearney, about twenty minutes from the clinic where she works in Overton, Nebraska. “Ed was a tough case whose needs and outcome were unsure, so my answers were mostly no or silence.”

  Ed’s week was almost up when Quandt received an e-mail from Laura Bradshaw of Healing HEART Sanctuary in Kanab, Utah. She asked Quandt to call her the following day to discuss Ed’s situation.

  For so many stray and unwanted animals, the difference between life and death hinges on the compassionate intervention of one person. For Ed, Betsy Quandt was that person. She had given him a second chance. Laura Bradshaw would be the next person in a long line who would parlay that second chance into a reclaimed life.

  Bradshaw told Quandt that, although she wasn’t able to accommodate Ed at the sanctuary, she was confident that she could find him a foster home in Kanab. That way, she reasoned, the volunteers at Healing HEART could still assist in his rehabilitation. In short order, Bradshaw had found a foster volunteer, a friend who offered to house the dog as a personal favor.

  Healing HEART Sanctuary is an extraordinary facility devoted to getting both animals and children back on their feet. The sanctuary takes in and rehabilitates rescued animals that have been injured or disabled. Some are adopted out to appropriate homes, and others stay on as part of the sanctuary’s on-site program. During an animal’s rehabilitative time at Healing HEART, children who are physically, mentally, or emotionally challenged get the chance to interact with, care for, and help in the recovery process of the animals.

  It’s nearly a thousand highway miles from Kearney, Nebraska, to Kanab, Utah, and no one liked the prospect of driving Ed. A member of the handicappedpets.com message board, where Ed’s plight was posted, suggested they turn to Pilots N Paws for transport, and in short order three PNP pilots offered to help. A legion of other volunteers offered assistance with overnight fostering, transportation to and from airports, and even backup ground transportation if the weather was too rough to cross the Rocky Mountains.

  “I was amazed at how many people stepped up,” says Bradshaw. “We had a Plan B, C, and D.”

  PNP pilot Joe Marley flew Ed from Cozad, Nebraska, to Longmont, Colorado.

  But Ed wasn’t out of the woods yet. On the very cold February morning that he was originally scheduled to fly Ed out of Nebraska, pilot Mike Gannon was signaled on the ramp that fire had broken out in his 1969 Cessna’s exhaust system and was trailing out of his tailpipe. No one was hurt, but the flight was scrubbed and Gannon’s plane was temporarily grounded.

  A few frantic phone calls later, Plan B fell into place. Joe Marley, a PNP pilot who had signed up to foster Ed overnight at his home in Longmont, Colorado, agreed to fly all the way to Nebraska to pick the dog up. Leaving Longmont the next day after getting off work, Marley landed in central Nebraska about two and a half hours later. “We had to change airports a couple of times—one had weather issues, another was closed,” remembers Marley. “Betsy went out of her way to drive to a different airport in a different town after dark to deliver Ed to me—she’s a gutsy girl.”

  At the municipal airport in Cozad, Nebraska, the two lifted Ed into the back of Marley’s Cherokee Six, and at last Ed was off, heading west into the darkening night. It was nearly 9 p.m. when Marley touched down at Vance Brand Municipal Airport in Longmont.

  Ed spent the next two nights at the Marley household. “My kids immediately fell in love with him,” he says, “especially my two-year-old daughter, who could only call him ‘Eggie.’ Ed was gentle as can be. He had an incredible disposition . . . and he received nonstop attention for the few days he stayed with us.”

  In the span of those few days, Ed was also growing noticeably more steady on his feet. “He wasn’t strong enough to run or jump,” says Marley, “but he could walk without assistance. When we left to go to the airport, he was recovered enough that he walked himself into the Suburban, including a step up.”

  His recovery had indeed begun while in Nebraska, awaiting transport, according to Betsy Quandt. The vet and Ed’s owner discussed the young shepherd’s improving condition, but the farmer ultimately decided that proceeding with the rescue plans would be the best thing for the dog.

  It was pilot Drew Armstrong’s job to fly Ed “over the rock pile.” On Friday,

  February 26, 2010, with a weather report for CAVU (ceiling and visibility unlimited), Armstrong and a friend took off from Grand Junction, Colorado, on the Western Slope of the Continental Divide, and flew east over the Rocky Mountains to pick up Ed in Longmont, where Marley met him at the airport.

  Ed arrives in Kanab, Utah. “I keep this photo on my bulletin board,” says pilot Drew Armstrong, “to remind me of a special dog given a special opportunity.”

  “I had brought a kennel but Ed just hopped up onto the rear seats so we just tethered him to keep him from trying to come up and help us fly the plane,” recalls Armstrong. “He was a great passenger. He just curled up on the seat for the entire trip.”

  Flight time to Kanab was a little more than two and a half hours. Armstrong relished the time with Ed, whom he called “a very special dog.” He admits that it was “sweet sorrow” to turn Ed over to the “strangers” waiting at the airport in Kanab.

  As Armstrong’s Bonanza touched down, the group let out a collective sigh of relief—and then a cheer. “So many people had come to the aid of this one dog, for this one mission to get him here,” explains Laura Bradshaw. “There were so many times the ball could have been dropped, but someone always stepped up when things broke down. That’s what was so cool about it.”

  Ed’s welcoming party included Laura Bradshaw and a handful of friends and Healing HEART volunteers. Kanab resident Linda Gail Stevens was among them. At Bradshaw’s urging, she’d come to greet Ed’s plane and take some pictures, bringing along her large six-year-old shepherd mix, Kobe.

  “We saw the plane come down and got our first glimpse of Ed,” Stevens recalls. “He was looking through the window as they taxied up to us. The pilot got out and they very carefully lifted him out and put him down on the tarmac. He was on his legs, walking, a little wobbly but better than we had anticipated.” As soon as Ed was on the ground, Kobe ran over and the two big dogs went nose-to-nose. “They greeted each other as if they were long-lost friends,” says Stevens. “They were instantly bonded. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  Laura Bradshaw remembers the fateful moment when Ed met Kobe . . . and Stevens met Ed. “She looked at me and said, ‘So this dog has a foster home?’”

  Ed gets a warm welcome from Laura Bradshaw, director of Healing HEART Sanctuary in Kanab, Utah.

  Bradshaw answered that while she did have a foster home lined up for Ed, she suspected that the person who had volunteered the service might be relieved if she found another option.

  “Everyone knew almost instantaneously [that Ed belonged with Linda Gail and Kobe]. . . . It was just so perfect.”

  —Laura Bradshaw, executive director, Healing HEART Sanctuary

  Well-laid plans have a way of changing quickly in the world of animal rescue, and on this bright afternoon in southern Utah, it became clear to all assembled that Ed’s future lay with Linda Gail Stevens and Kobe. A quick round of discussions among Stevens, Bradshaw, and the intended foster volunteer led to a unanimous decision. “An hour later,” recalls Stevens, “Laura was on my doorstep with Ed.”

  Once prematurely registered as euthanized, Ed is now the picture of health and vitality.

  Looking back on that day, Linda Gail Stevens admits that she foresaw Ed’s fate the moment he exited Drew Armstrong’s airplane. “I can’t really tell you how or why, but I knew—I knew at that point that he was going to be mine.”

  Ed didn’t end up spending much time at Healing HEART Sanctuary. As he made his way across the Rocky Mountain west, he was also slowly but st
eadily getting better on his own. By the time he landed in Utah, his mobility was almost entirely restored. Two vets examined him in Utah, and though neither could say definitively what had paralyzed his back legs, the consensus was that Ed had experienced some sort of soft-tissue injury, and that when the swelling subsided, so did his paralysis. It’s amazing to think that this relatively minor, temporary affliction would have—without the intervention of a big-hearted veterinary technician in Nebraska—cost this young, strong animal his life.

  That’s something Stevens will never forget. “Without Betsy, I wouldn’t have this remarkable animal,” she says. “It’s thanks to her that I am now living with these two beautiful souls.”

  During her short time caring for Ed in Nebraska, Betsy Quandt only managed to get one picture of them together.

  “I’m so glad that things worked out for Ed. I don’t feel like a hero, though. I didn’t have any of the right tools to help him. It felt like a losing battle until Laura came along. If it wasn’t for her, this story would have been a heartbreaker.”

  —Betsy Quandt

  Months later, it came as a surprise to precisely no one when Stevens officially adopted Ed—another case of the common phenomenon affectionately known as “foster failure.”

  Top: Big Ed was a definite hit with the kids (Marissa Cox and Waylon White) when he accompanied Laura Bradshaw on a visit to a Head Start program in Kanab, Utah. Bottom: Ed romps on the banks of the Colorado River in Arizona.

  “I’d tell everyone, ‘I’m just fostering him,’ and they’d give me a look and say, ‘That dog is yours. You’re not giving him up.’” Stevens herself can’t quite explain her hesitation in making matters permanent. Likely, it just took her head awhile to catch up to her heart.

  Since adopting Ed, Linda Gail Stevens has joined the staff of Healing HEART Sanctuary as an animal caregiver. As for Ed, she says, “He has never shown any signs of any problems at all. He is completely recovered.” Still, looking through his veterinary files once the adoption was completed, she got a chilling reminder of just how close he had come. “On his file,” she says, “he was already registered as euthanized.”

  A new life warrants celebration, and in their own way, Linda Gail Stevens and Kobe celebrate Ed’s new life every day. To go along with that new life, Stevens believes that Ed wanted a new name—a name not tied to the negative energies residual from his old life. “I wanted to give him a name that was just for him,” she explains. She spent several weeks thinking up names that suited him.

  She was still weighing the contenders one day as she walked with her dogs near their high-desert home. “I was watching him,” she says, “and we have sort of open scrubland here, and he was running through the scrubs, and he just appeared to flow across the earth, hardly touching the ground. He looked like a kite before it lifts up, and suddenly he jumped over a scrub bush, and it was like a kite taking off, and he kind of flew with the wind. I spontaneously called the name, ‘Kite!’ and he immediately looked at me and came over, and I thought, ‘OK, you like that one. That one’s yours.’”

  Asked if she believes in fate, Stevens waits a long moment before answering. “I don’t know what you want to call it . . . but I’ve been told that this animal made its way to me—that whether I wanted it or not, this dog found me and that’s it. So I’m happy with that.”

  “Having to jump through so many hoops meant that many more people became involved. This thing needed to bless more people along the way before it played out.”

  —Laura Bradshaw, Healing HEART Sanctuary

  AFTERWORD

  I met Sam Taylor for the first time on the last day of 2009. I’d had the idea for this book just days before while talking to Sam’s wife, Wanda, who I’d come to know while working on a previous project. During a casual conversation, Wanda mentioned Sam’s unusual volunteer work and my ears perked up. Flying dogs? I had to hear more.

  We met for breakfast at a restaurant near the Taylors’ home in Kansas City. I’d come prepared for an interview—notebook and digital recorder in hand. The audio file from that morning provides the perfect background buzz of a busy breakfast diner—coffee cups clanking, silverware clinking, the white noise of a dozen different conversations. Not ideal circumstances for an interview. But listening closely to that recording I can hear the excitement in Sam’s voice as he recounted the rescue flights he’d been making for the nine months previous. He talked with obvious affection about the dogs he’d flown—the Siberian husky mother and her five-day-old pups; the hundred-pound bloodhound that untethered himself from the backseat and tried to climb on to Sam’s lap during landing; the Belgian sheepdog he’d flown, fostered, fallen in love with, and desperately wanted to keep; and the Labradoodle that did become a permanent part of the Taylor home after being turned away from a previously arranged foster home.

  It wasn’t as easy to get Sam to talk about himself, but over that and subsequent meetings his story did emerge with some coaxing. He was ex-navy, ex-Pentagon, and a retired high school teacher. He’d flown navy helicopters during the Vietnam War years—as a search-and-rescue pilot—but he’d also earned his pilot’s license for fixed-wing aircraft. In the years following his twenty-year military career, while working as a teacher in Pennsylvania and Ohio, he had flown whenever circumstances and budget allowed—first in a rented plane and later in a well-used two-seater he’d bought in Tennessee. But by 2008, his flight hours had dwindled—despite the fact that he had retired from teaching several years earlier. “I always had the pilot’s license in my pocket, but just never used it,” he says. “Even with a bird in the hangar, I had, like a lot of pilots, lost that purpose for flying. The $100 hamburger had lost its appeal.” When he heard about Pilots N Paws in March 2009, he rediscovered his purpose. He logged well over three hundred flight hours before the end of that year. In the previous year, he had flown thirty-nine. The search-and-rescue pilot was back on duty.

  I loved hearing Sam’s stories, but I was, of course, secretly hoping for more. As our first meeting wound down, I got the invitation I wanted. He asked if I’d like to accompany him on an upcoming rescue flight. Several weeks later, we were driving from Kansas City to Leavenworth, Kansas, where Sam kept his plane. My education—about Pilots N Paws, airborne animal transport, and the esoteric world of private pilots, small planes, and small airfields—had begun.

  On the drive to Leavenworth, I asked a lot of questions—about his experiences in the military, about owning and maintaining a small plane, about the physics of flight. I tried not to sound like an idiot. What exactly was a nautical mile? And if it was nautical, why was it used in the sky? Sam was patient and genial and made things easy to understand. He had been a high school teacher for eleven years, after all.

  It was cold that morning, and the airfield manager, an animal lover who approved of Sam’s volunteer work, had pulled Sam’s plane inside the hangar the night before to warm the engine oil. While Sam checked flight conditions in the office, I wandered into the small hangar. There were five or six airplanes inside—gleaming, lean, efficient-looking machines. A few were undergoing some sort of maintenance—parts lay nearby, engines exposed. I was clueless but impressed. Sam found me a few minutes later, checking out a very slick-looking plane that I later learned was a Cirrus SR22. “That’s not my plane,” he said, and then with no small degree of pride, gestured beyond it and said, “Here she is.”

  November-Seven-Six-Zero-Niner-Whiskey, Sam’s plane, is a Piper Cherokee 180 built in 1964. Parked side by side, the Cherokee and the curvilinear Cirrus offered a quick glimpse of the evolution of small aircraft. Aerodynamics no doubt had figured into the design of the Cherokee nearly fifty years ago, but the old girl—with her stubby fuselage, blunt nose, and “Hershey bar” wings—did seem a bit chunky next to her modern descendent. I knocked on the Cherokee’s aluminum skin. Thinner than I would have imagined. It yielded to pressure almost as readily as a beer can. I eyed the propeller—maybe six feet long and a few inches broad
. “Is this really all that moves a plane?” My inner dialogue was slipping out, carrying my anxieties with it.

  “That’s nothing,” said Sam. “Check this out.” He unlatched two extremely low-tech fasteners and lifted the hood. “It’s basically a lawn mower engine with three extra cylinders.”

  If I replied to that comment, I don’t recall what I said. More likely I was dumbstruck. But I do remember that after a beat Sam followed up his own comment. “What? How often do lawnmowers just stop for no reason?” I excused myself to make a quick phone call. I wanted to tell my wife I loved her.

  Before Sam was finished with this introduction—airplane to passenger—he had one more preflight adjustment to make. He produced a role of duct tape from his flight bag, ripped off a piece, four or five inches long, and affixed it to the front “grill” of the plane. “My trusty hundred-mile-per-hour tape,” he said in response to my look of astonishment. “It’s cold out, so I need to restrict the airflow through the oil cooler.” Then, smoothing the tape and giving this modification an approving look, he said, “Let’s go save some dogs.”

  Having pulled the plane onto the ramp, Sam opened its only door and climbed inside. I followed, folding my six-foot-five frame into the copilot seat. Though my knees were nearly pressed against the yoke, I was careful not to touch anything, lest I accidently trip the wrong toggle. In the pilot’s seat, Sam was all business and methodical self-assuredness. Even after a lifetime of takeoffs and landings, he religiously checked a preflight list kept on the dashboard. Once the prestart checklist was complete, he opened his vent window, shouted “Clear” to no one, and pressed the start button. The engine jumped to life. Then came taxi and engine run-up. When all met with his satisfaction, Sam goosed the throttle. As we accelerated down the runway and lifted off, I was reassured not just by Sam, but by the little plane’s get up and go. (On a subsequent flight, Sam told me about his first plane, whose one hundred horsepower engine routinely made takeoffs “interesting.”)