600 Takes Offs And Landings Through The Weekend
Six hundred flights carrying humanitarian personnel, relief
provisions and evacuees have transited through the Port-au-Prince,
Haiti, airport since the U.S. Air Force began operating there a day
after a magnitude 7 earthquake rocked Haiti January 12. Air Force
Col. Buck Elton, in an operational update with reporters Sunday,
added that no major security incidents have occurred at the airport
since the Air Force personnel began overseeing the high volume of
traffic.
"Since then, we've controlled approximately 600 takeoffs and
landings from this 10,000-foot strip that normally operates three
aircraft out of it on a daily basis," said Elton, commander of the
U.S. forces directing flights at Haiti's airport. "Everything has
been very orderly," he added. "The Haitian police force is helping
out tremendously with crowd control and with traffic control around
the airfield, and we've had no major incidents."
In an update with Tim Callaghan of the U.S. Agency for
International Development's foreign disaster assistance office,
Elton said 24 patients have been brought to the airfield for
treatment, including 16 Americans with what Elton described as
"crush injuries."
While the rush of supplies and aid from other countries
initially overwhelmed the airport's limited capacity, Elton said,
the capacity for processing arriving and departing flights is
improving steadily. He noted that about 60 percent of the flights
coming in are civilian and 40 percent are military.
Haiti has been the focus of an expansive relief effort in the
wake of what one official has called one of the greatest
humanitarian emergencies in the history of the Americas. Original
estimates by the Red Cross were that upwards of 50,000 people were
killed in the quake, but other reports elevate the figure to
between 100,000 to 200,000.
For its part, the Defense Department has authorized up to $20
million in immediate aid to Haiti, and the nation's top military
officer estimated that up to 10,000 U.S. troops would be in Haiti
by Monday.
In his update, Elton underscored the speed with which Air Force
personnel began operations after landing at the badly damaged
airport around 7 p.m. on January 13. "Within 28 minutes of landing
our first aircraft, we had special tactics combat control teams
controlling the airspace around the airfield, and sequencing in the
arriving aircraft that night," he said.