a small, independent flight carrier with a couple of
air ambulances.
Phoenix Air itself had been around since the ear-
ly 1970s, when Dent Thompson’s brother Mark had
started it as a skydiving school after returning from
piloting helicopters in Vietnam. Over the interven-
ing decades, the airline had evolved from its original
charter into the business of doing “difficult things.”
These were, as Dent says, aviation tasks so complex,
paperwork-intensive, and/or unenviable that, once
you’d established yourself as the only airline willing to
do them, you could have all the contracts you wanted.
Dent Thompson and his brother Mark had grown
up in Atlanta, so Mark had launched the airline out
of nearby Cartersville airport, an ambitious name
for a single asphalt runway in a town where every
waitress knows you want an Arnold Palmer with
your burger, easy on the tea. Dent was on vacation
from Cartersville right now, although it was starting
to feel less like a vacation and more like a bad dream
you’d have after reading Stephen King’s The Stand.
Dent didn’t know any medical facts about Ebola. He
just started free-associating the phrases he’d seen
on TV: It was the plague. You bled out of your eye-
balls. Your internal organs liquefied.
Walters told Dent what they had going on up there,
which was that two humanitarian medical workers
helping out with the Ebola crisis in Liberia had come
down with it. Their names were Kent Brantly and
Nancy Writebol, and while everyone wanted to get
them home, they had no idea how to do so safely. “The
general dogma was, you don’t bring the zombie apoca-
lypse to a city that doesn’t have zombies,” Walters says.
But Walters had remembered what Dent had told him
while planning Sochi, which was that as a joint conse-
quence of ferrying Atlanta-based Centers for Disease
Control luminaries around and being down for just
about anything, Phoenix Air had developed a proprie-
tary system for the transport of extremely sick people
with extremely contagious diseases.
Dent looks like a painting of the fifth Earl of some-
where, down to the fluffy white hair and the peaked
eyebrows. One imagines the arches of those eyebrows
rose and rose as he contemplated the ponderous fu-
ture of this particular difficult task. Dent told Walters
that if he could bring all the top doctors in the U.S. gov-
ernment to Cartersville to tell him the system—which
had never been used—would work, then they’d be will-@PopularMechanics _ July/August 2019 85