Alaskan Lady Drops Thanksgiving Turkeys from Airplane for Distant Neighbors

It’s a fowl! It’s a airplane! It’s… frozen turkeys?

Residents residing in Skwentna and West Susitna Valley, Alaska, had been delivered their Thanksgiving dinner in a really uncommon manner. It’s a typical perception that turkeys can’t fly, nevertheless it appears they do — a minimum of in Alaska.

For the final three years, native pilot Esther Sanderlin has been dropping what the native information refers to as “turkey bombs” close to her fellow Alaskan neighbors who reside off the street system. After listening to one in every of her latest neighbors discuss how squirrel meat could be their protein of selection for Thanksgiving dinner a brand new private mission was ignited. 

“I used to be visiting our latest neighbor and so they had been speaking about splitting a squirrel 3 ways for dinner, and the way that didn’t actually go very far,” Sanderlin advised Alaska’s NBC affiliate KTUU on Monday, Nov. 25. “And I simply had a thought at that second, ‘You recognize what, I’m going to airdrop them a turkey for Thanksgiving,’ as a result of I not too long ago rebuilt my first airplane with my dad and so I can do that actually simply.”

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Traversing the frozen terrains, particularly with out a close by street system, could make it powerful for locals who’re searching for a scorching meal for the vacations, however Sanderlin’s airborne supply system offers her a bonus.

“Throughout freeze up, you’ll be able to’t actually get round so you’ll be able to’t journey on the market,” she mentioned. “However you’ll be able to fly so long as you don’t land.”

However Sanderlin isn’t the primary in her group to drop turkeys from the sky. Actually, she really bought the concept from somebody who did the identical factor for her neighborhood whereas rising up in Alaska, and he or she determined it was her time to pay it ahead.

“We had a good friend, a neighbor who would air-drop turkeys to my household and to different households within the neighborhood,” she recalled. “That was simply such a huge effect on my life and others locally.”

This 12 months she’s dropping about 30 to 40 turkeys to make sure that her neighbors have a pleasant, scorching meal to gobble up on Thanksgiving, however her hopes are to do much more sooner or later and switch her private mission right into a nonprofit so she will attain extra folks throughout Alaska. 

“My imaginative and prescient with that is to achieve farther components of Alaska,” she mentioned. “As a result of there are such a lot of households that reside off the grid.”