Six teams of roughly 12 people took turns hauling a 67,000-pound commercial WestJet aircraft 100 meters, competing to see which team could pull the plane fastest
The WestJet hangar at the Edmonton International Airport was abuzz Monday morning with a crowd of more than 50 volunteers who signed up for Hope Air’s Haul for Hope annual plane pull event.
Six teams of roughly 12 people took turns hauling a 67,000-pound commercial WestJet aircraft 100 metres, competing to see which team could pull the plane fastest. The tough pull is meant to symbolize the “difficult journeys faced by patients who must travel long distances to access essential medical care,” said the event’s news release.
Hope Air provides travel and accommodations for people who are sick and must travel for treatment, including patients who require travelling because they live in a rural area without the necessary resources, or they live in an urban region but must travel outside of their city to seek treatment. The latter was the case for Adrienne Mahoney, who spoke at the event on Monday.
“My health challenges have been very plentiful over the years, and I have a very complex medical profile, to say the least,” Mahoney said.
Speaking to the group who had gathered to pull the plane, Mahoney told her story of using Hope Air, and what led her to it. After receiving a heart transplant that was required after a rare autoimmune disease, Mahoney found out later that she had multiple rare cancers, further complicating her medical needs.
Last summer, following an abdominal surgery, Mahoney was told by her medical team that she would have to travel from Edmonton to Calgary every week for several months to undergo a complicated blood treatment, which is when she found Hope Air.
“I remember the day the application was approved for my first week, I cried tears of immense joy and relief knowing that Hope Air was going to fundamentally change the state of my life for the better, I could now focus solely on just recovery,” said Mahoney.
As a result of the treatment she went to Calgary to receive, Mahoney said she’s no longer in acute organ failure.
“It’s no stretch to say that Hope Air played a pivotal role in saving my life last summer,” she said.
Hope Air chief development officer Jon Collins said the goal of Haul for Hope is to raise $300,000 over the course of five events at different stops across the country.
“We’re at 40,000 travel arrangements projected this year, which would be by far a record for the charity. And so events like this help us raise needed funds to support people who need it,” said Collins.
“It’s not without effort, and we sure hope that the rest of our sites pull their weight, but we feel like we’re going to hit that goal.”
Despite the staggering weight of the aircraft, the teams were pulling the plane across 100 metres in 35 seconds on average. The winning haulers, Dawson Wallace, scored the clinching time of 32 seconds — a feat so strong that even on their second attempt, the group couldn’t touch their first time.