Flying with angels

I am headed down the Maricopa-Casa Grande Highway at 7 a.m. on my way to meet Pinal County businessman Scott Lehman at Casa Grande Airport to take a special kind of plane ride.

Lehman is an accomplished pilot and for the past year has been using his Cirrus SR22 to carry critically ill patients to and from their homes and the places they have to go for treatment, flying as a volunteer for the non-profit organization Angel Flight West.

On this Friday morning, we are scheduled to pick up cancer patient Neil Griévoüs (pronounced Gre-vul) and his wife Donna in Scottsdale and fly them to a remote airfield in Utah where another pilot would meet us and ferry them on to their home in Bozeman, Montana.

Lehman has his sleek white aircraft pulled up near the back door of the small terminal when I arrive. The Cirrus is a $450,000 high-tech prop plane made mainly for businesses that require cross-country travel but can’t quite afford a jet. The four-seat aircraft can zip along at 200 miles an hour and fly up to an altitude of 17,000 feet. Like other Angel Flight pilots, Lehman donates the operational costs of the flight along with his time.

“I try to fly one mission a month,” he says as we get underway. “I’d do it every day if I could afford to. It is the best thing I do with the airplane.” Lehman, who owns Premier Auto Center in Casa Grande, uses the plane mainly to fly to auto auctions and for other business purposes.

The 42-mile flight from Casa Grande to Scottsdale is exhilarating. Though Lehman expects clouds further north, the Arizona morning is bright and clear as we sail over empty desert, abrupt little mountains and endless tracts of housing, enjoying a view that stretches from the southern horizon to the rugged peaks north and east of Phoenix. At Scottsdale Airport, we circle once and swoop in at a steep angle for a feather-light landing, our padded headphones filled with the cryptic chatter of air traffic controllers and other pilots.

Neil and Donna are waiting in the terminal, standing by a single suitcase, looking a little bit uncertain. Neil, 78, tells me he has been battling colon cancer for three and a half years.

“I am down here for a clinical trial at the Virginia Piper Research Center,” he says. “All the off-the-shelf chemo therapies have failed, so my oncologist has me on an experimental drug. I’ve been on the trial for about two months and my chemo treatment is every Wednesday. We’ve been down here mostly, but we have managed to get home a couple of times.”

Neil found out about Angel Flight from an employee at the research center. Both he and Donna say they are deeply grateful and somewhat amazed that pilots like Lehman are willing to fly them back and forth at no charge.

“I don’t know that words can describe the way it makes me feel,” Neil says. “It is fantastic. I can hardly believe it is happening.”

“It has made a huge difference,” Donna says. “We are thrilled to be able to go home.”

A small man with a timeworn face, Neil grins when I ask him how he is feeling after two months of treatment. “Real, real good!” he says. “I haven’t felt this good in two or three years.”

The flight north
Back out on the runway, we climb up onto the wing of the Cirrus and squeeze into the cabin, Neil and Donna sitting side-by-side in the back, me in the co-pilot’s seat next to Lehman.

Soaring above the mountains and mesas, we cruise north at 8,000 feet, then go higher, to 12,000 feet, to get above the gathering clouds.

The Cirrus has sophisticated instrumentation, with more than 130 dials, switches and glowing screens on the dashboard, and Lehman explains some the functions to us as the plane flies itself toward its programmed destination on automatic pilot.

Droning along in bright sunshine, looking down at the dazzling white clouds, there is a feeling of freedom from everyday life, a sense of widening perspective along with some of the residual wonder of flight that people still haven’t gotten over more than a century after Kitty Hawk.

Neil seems lighthearted. He asks Lehman questions about the airplane’s capabilities and tells us about the steel fabrication business he owned in Seattle before he retired. He had 30 employees and once fabricated all of the structural steel for a 25-story building.

“There was 30 miles of quarter-inch weld in that job,” he says with pride.

Donna looks out the window at the clouds below with a peaceful expression on her face.

After several hours in the air, a smooth flight all the way, we leave the clouds behind and come in for a landing in Delta, Utah. The airfield is in the middle of nowhere and we seem almost as isolated on the ground as we were in the sky.

The other pilot, Hans Fuegi, is already there, standing by his Piper airplane looking long and lean and western with a dilapidated hanger and range of mountains in the background. A real estate investor and restaurateur who owns the Grub Steak restaurant in Park City, Utah, he has been flying Angel Flights for 15 years.

While the two pilots talk shop, I ask Neil how he keeps his spirits up in his long, difficult struggle.

“I feel real strong about doing the clinical trials, and that gives me a lot of fight,” he says. “It helps me out a lot because I feel like I am contributing in some little way to the battle against cancer. It gives me something positive to dwell on, and that is all I really need.

“I have cancer,” he adds in a matter-of-fact tone without an trace of self-pity. “That is just the way it is. It is my calling in life now. Every little bit they can learn from me to help the future — that is what matters. If what I am going through can help the next person, that is what I hope for.”

“What’s your prognosis?” I ask him.

“It’s too soon to tell,” he says. “I feel a whole lot better, but I have real low cancer markers in my blood. They stay real low, so the doctors can’t tell how well the drug is working. They won’t know until they do a CAT scan. If the cancer is still growing, that will mean the drug isn’t working for me. I am hopeful that if that happens they will put me on another trial. That is one of the good things about the Virginia Piper Center. They have about 40 trials going on there at one time. Cancer is tough, Steve. It is mystifying. But I am confident they are gaining on it.”

“He had stage four cancer when they found it,” Donna says. “Ten years ago, he wouldn’t have had a chance. But it’s has been three and a half years, going on four years in April.”

“How do you stay positive?” I ask Donna.

“You just have to take it one day at a time,” she says. “That is all you can do.”

“Do you have any kind of support group?”

“Yes!” she says with the widest smile I have seen all day. “My eight grandchildren. They are my best support group.”

As Neil walks resolutely to the Piper with Donna and Hans, I think about his career crafting strong structures out of steel, and I see the strength of steel in him, in his courage and determination, as if he somehow absorbed the indomitable quality of the material he worked with for so long.

Parting ways
Lehman and I watch the Piper take off, then gas up the Cirrus and climb back aboard for the return flight.

Like Neil, Lehman says he is motivated in what he does by a desire to fight cancer. His older brother Allen died from melanoma 18 years ago when he was 36 and Scott was 30.

“I hate cancer,” Lehman says. “I want to do anything I can to help beat it and to help people who are fighting it. It has been a goal of mine ever since I started taking flying lessons to participate in Angel Flights. I read about the program in a magazine when I was sitting in a terminal waiting for my instructor one day, and I decided right then and there that when I got the hours I needed, I was going to do this.”

Lehman also talks about the emotional dividends of being an “angel” as we wing our way through the clouds.

“When you see the problems these people are struggling with, it make your own problems seem like nothing,” he says. “Almost all of them have unbelievably great attitudes, like Neil. It is humbling and very rewarding to help them. This has almost become the reason I get up and go to work each day, so that I can afford to do these flights.”

Sidebar: Angel Flight West
Angel Flight West got the heavenly part of its name from the “City of Angels,” where it was founded in 1983 at the Santa Monica Airport by a handful of pilots who wanted to use their airplanes to help others.

Associate Executive Director Cheri Cimmarrusti says things were slow for the first few years because people had a hard time believing the pilots were actually offering to fly patients for free, with no strings attached.

Word eventually got around, however, and since 1999 Angel Flight West has flown nearly 45,000 missions, transporting 9,000 unique passengers. In 2009 alone, the organization’s 1,600 participating pilots helped more than 1,300 patients, flying many of them repeatedly to and from lifesaving destinations.

Besides flying cancer patients and critically-ill children, Angel Flight assists in disaster relief. Its pilots completed more that 550 flights for relief workers going to Haiti after last year’s devastating earthquake.

To learn more about this inspirational and lifesaving organization, go to angelflightwest.org