Northwoods Airlifeline

Northwoods AirLifeline is a non-profit organization of volunteer pilots from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and northeast Wisconsin who donate their time and aircraft to help patients and their families with urgent medical needs for services not found locally. Since our founding in 1989, about 1900 missions have been flown to destinations in lower Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, South Dakota, Iowa, Nebraska, Missouri, Connecticut, and Texas, all at no cost to the individual.

Northwoods Airlifeline helps meet the needs of individuals who are financially distressed, unable to travel by other means, or under severe time constraints. We have found the most urgent transports involve transplant cases, since there is no place in the Upper Peninsula where transplants are done and the window of opportunity to perform the procedure is small. We frequently receive transport requests from chronically ill people who cannot drive long distances or afford commercial flights to specialized medical facilities. We also transport individuals beyond medical help who want only to be taken home be with their families, a service not covered by insurance. Relatives of severely injured patients transferred out of area may themselves need immediate transportation to be with their loved ones. These are among the many logistical gaps in medical care that Northwoods Airlifeline attempts to fill.

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