cidaires even in times of relative peace. Beni in par-
ticular had been targeted in bombings, motivated by
mistrust of foreign doctors, that had driven Doctors
Without Borders back to Goma, a larger town even
farther south. Now, the government had declared
that the town of Beni would not be allowed to vote
in the upcoming presidential election. LaRochelle’s
superiors feared the hospital wouldn’t be a safe place
for him to spend three weeks.
Since 2014, Phoenix Air had expanded. They now
had airplanes stationed in Los Angeles; San Diego;
Norfolk, Virginia; Stuttgart; Nairobi; and Malta.
After many interrupted Christmas vacations among
State Department, NGO, and CDC higher-ups, it was
decided that the Nairobi plane would come for LaRo-
chelle. It was a Gulfstream III, which—regardless of
violence—was of a size that could not land on any of
the runways north of Goma. But that was fine. LaRo-
chelle’s superiors told him he’d leave for Goma the
next day.
The next morning, LaRochelle made his way
south. First, he rode east to a town called Bunia in an
NGO Land Cruiser whose driver he tried not to touch.
Then he boarded a United Nations Humanitarian
Air Service plane to Beni that was mostly empty. The
general medical consensus on Ebola is that you’re
not contagious until you show symptoms, but LaRo-
chelle still preferred empty planes and cars where he
could stay as far from others as possible. When his
U.N. flight connected in Beni, however, aid workers
were evacuating en masse ahead of the December
30 election (and after an attack on the Ebola isola-
tion center, which had occurred that morning). The
flight from Beni to Goma was full. “It was pretty un-
comfortable being four inches from another person,
knowing that that person would really not want to be
next to me,” LaRochelle says.
Phoenix Air arrived around 4 p.m. local time.
“They had [LaRochelle] in a safe house, that’s what
they called it; it’s right out of a James Bond novel,”
Dent says. The medical officers took LaRochelle’s
temperature and decided he was well enough to ride
in the plane’s seats until he felt ill. To LaRochelle, the
whole trip felt like a weird formality: He’d been at
risk, sure, but he never fully believed he’d catch Ebo-
la. He spent most of the flight talking to the Phoenix
Air staff about the towns that lie between Atlanta and
his hometown of Chattanooga, Tennessee. If he’d de-One of the
modifications
that Phoenix
Air makes
to their
Gulfstream III
is cutting
a door in the
side in order to
load patients
more easily.90 July/August 2019 _ PopularMechanics.com