You have a backup, right?

You don’t really need that computer backup, or three months of rainy day savings, or those ventilators in the storage room…until you truly need them.

I don’t know about you, but the sheer volume of COVID-19 stories is starting to wear on me. But a recent announcement from Daher about the delivery of ventilators from Sandpoint, Idaho, to Sacramento, California, using a Kodiak 100 caught my attention.

The announcement is about a fellow Sandpoint, Idaho, manufacturer, Percussionaire, needing to deliver some of its 1,000-plus order of ventilators to California. The California Department of Public Health’s Emergency Preparedness Office placed the order and the TXP 5 ventilators were to be delivered to Sacramento.

While Sandpoint is beautiful, it isn’t exactly the center of the universe. Under normal circumstances and timelines, shipping the company’s products is likely not a big deal. But there’s nothing normal about these circumstances or timelines.

Mark Baillie, Percussionaire’s president and CEO, said he first considered using commercial airfreight for the Idaho-to-California shipment for the ventilators. 

“This would have required us to transport them by road to a major airport — likely Spokane, Washingont, 70-plus miles to the southwest — undergo processing and wait until an airline flight was available, then repeat the processing and trucking on the other end,” Baillie said. “The Kodiak enabled us to transport our equipment directly from Sandpoint to Sacramento in a flight of under four hours, which was truly phenomenal.”

N265KQ, a brand new Kodiak 100, still in primer green, was pressed into service. Two round trip flights from Sandpoint to Sacramento took place April 15-16. Each southbound flight was filled with 120 boxed ventilators. Just three hours, 45 minutes later, they were in Sacramento. 

My initial thought, I hate to admit, was publicity stunt. After all, loading all 1,000-plus ventilators — not just a quarter of the order — on a single truck would have them in Sacramento in about 15 hours. And of course, there is air freight as Baillie mentioned, but that would have been much more expensive compared to driving.

And according to a Sacramento Bee story the ventilators were “transferred from the plane to a truck bound for a state warehouse to await distribution.” These particular ventilators weren’t even going directly to a hospital room.

But the more I thought about it, the more I realized none of that matters. 

I believe the pandemic lays bare a lack of will. A lack of will to do the hard work of preparing for the worst, while hoping for the best. 

Ask a small business owner how important their company files, which aren’t backed up, are when they are hit with a ransomware virus. Or a family who loses thousands of digital photos and memories — which aren’t back up — when their house burns down. Or when a hospital, in need of a ventilator, finds none when they look in the supply room. I could go on, but you get the idea.

And in case you haven’t heard, Idaho has recently been hit by a few earthquakes. What if one of those quakes damaged the airport or the highway? Getting those needed ventilators from Sandpoint to anywhere — via “traditional” methods — could become a challenge, if not nearly impossible. 

General aviation to the rescue. 

The Kodiak was originally designed to operate safely off-airport. If the airport and the highway had been knocked out of commission, all the Kodiak would need is about 1,000′ of relatively smooth and straight space, and those ventilators could then go anywhere. That’s utility. That’s general aviation. 

To be a backup, general aviation’s needs are not overwhelming. But our impact might just be the difference between life and death. Literally.

So, in this case, a high-tech manufacturing company, located in a relatively small town, provides high quality jobs and is connected to the capital of California, and the world. In normal circumstances, all is good. And should the worst happen, they’re still connected to the world by a small airplane and a runway. This is — or should be — an economic development office’s dream come true.

When we get on the other side of this pandemic, share this story with your local government and economic development offices and demand they support your local airport and use that support to attract top tier businesses to your community.

Having a backup gives you options. And options are a good thing. 

Then again, maybe you are the type of person who prefers to not have a backup.