South African Tsunami Helicopter Make Profit in Indonesia
Sunday, 17-April-2005, 23:42:43 Clicks: 38
Jakarta, Indonesia-Relief -- Naturelink, South African company, dispatched 5 helicopters to Indonesia on early January to help tsunami victim in Aceh. Funded in part by South African government, the relief choper makes profit too during its mission in Indonesia tsunami zone.
Commercial Aviation Association of South Africa (CAASA) said on its January newsletter, instead of helping South African relief workers, such as Global Relief, the choppers provide commercial flight for Save the Children, Médecins Sans Frontières and World Vision.
Christine Louw, leader of Global Relief team in Meulaboh, Sumatra, told CAASA in January that they thought they had an 'understanding' that they could count on support from two of the helicopters flown to Sumatra on 6 January as part of the humanitarian mission.
Instead, the helicopters were being paid for at commercial rates of ''well over $2000 per hour'', according to Don Cressman, vice-president of Air Serv International, a US-based non-profit organisation, and Chris Briers, CEO of Naturelink.
Global Relief could not afford the rates and was having to rely on US military helicopters instead, Louw said.
Last Wednesday, Low and his team has return to Johannesburg from Meulaboh.
Briers and Cressman said that about half of the SA government’s donation of $750 000 had gone towards the cost of flying an Ilyushin-76, laden with the two helicopters and supplies to Sumatra, and, unlike this flight, the costs of shipping three more helicopters from South Africa to Sumatra later had been covered by the NGOs that had requested their services.
''It is sad that bad feeling has been created between organisations doing a tremendous amount of good in bringing aid to those hit so hard by the tsunami,'' wrote CAASA