Flying the Good Flight with Master Teacher Jack Long

Action School of Business, OMAR, Jun 6th, 2012

Next week Master Teacher Jack Long, Chairman and Co-founder of SchoolAdmin, will take to the skies. Once again he’s volunteering his plane and piloting skills in what’s become an ongoing series of aviation missions that he’s run to support medical aid and wildlife conservation.

In the last two years, Jack has flown medical supplies and personnel to Haiti shortly after the 2010 earthquake, brought a couple of seriously injured Haitian girls to the US for extensive medical care, and transported endangered wildlife across North America to support species growth and repopulation.

We talked to Jack recently about his missions, how his entrepreneurship enabled them, and how his June 2012 trip builds on one he flew last year.

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After his Haiti trips, Jack began working with LightHawk, an environmental aviation non-profit that acts as a middleman between environmental and conservation-related organizations and pilots who can help their causes. Jack has run several missions, transporting Mexican Gray Wolves and Orange-breasted Falcon chicks across North America.

“My wife Carolyn and I are very active and supportive of The Nature Conservancy and conservation causes in general,” Jack said. “So LightHawk represented a good fit for me.”

Since 2009, the Mexican Gray Wolf has been the most endangered mammal in North America. The Mexican Wolf Species Survival Plan aims to repopulate the species and reintroduce it into the wild. This involves both pairing and breeding wolves in captivity, for release into the wild, and moving wolves around amongst captive breeding sites, keeping the wolves’ DNA pool varied.

Jack has piloted several LightHawk flights to support the Wolf’s survival, flying wolves fromNew Orleans to Mexico City; Albuquerque toSt. Louis; and Soccoro, New Mexico toMonterrey, Mexico.

On each flight, Jack carried two wolves, each set in an individual crate just a few feet behind his pilot’s seat. Jack pointed out that while he was accompanied by wildlife handlers on his US flights, he flew solo with his canine cargo on his flights south of the border.

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Read the full article here.