Eighteen-month-old Baron Yerby may not be your typical corporate jet passenger.
But that didn”™t prevent him from hitching a ride aboard global tech giant NCR”™s private plane from New Jersey to Atlanta on April 14.
Thanks to Corporate Angel Network (CAN), a nonprofit organization that arranges free travel for cancer patients aboard corporate jets, he and his parents benefited from empty seats on the late-night flight.
And while the trip alone was a monumental occasion for the Yerbys, it also marked a significant milestone in Westchester-based CAN”™s history as the 50,000th flight provided by the organization.
Like in Baron”™s case, many of the patients the organization helps have run out of local treatment options.
At just 3 months old, Baron was diagnosed with retinoblastoma, a rare form of eye cancer.
After doctors in his home city of Atlanta exhausted all treatment options available in the area, the only course of action was a procedure performed at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City, some 900 miles away from the Yerby home.
These treatments will be ongoing for the foreseeable future, leaving Baron”™s parents, Johnathan and Casey, to arrange monthly travel plans to Sloan Kettering.
Johnathan Yerby said that coordinating travel arrangements to New York is “a constant battle, besides the cancer.”
It was during one such trip to the hospital that the Yerbys learned about CAN through another family who had used its services.
“(CAN) takes away one of the stresses,” Yerby said.
The organization traces its roots to Westchester in 1981 and a vision of three people.
Leonard M. Greene, founder and president of Safe Flight Instrument Corp., Priscilla Blum, a licensed commercial pilot who flew recreationally out of Westchester, and Jay N. Weinberg, then owner of a Mount Vernon-based Avis Car Rental franchise, together developed the idea of asking corporations to accept cancer patients as guest passengers.
All three had firsthand experience of the difficulties facing cancer patients and their families. Blum and Weinberg were each cancer survivors themselves, while Greene lost his wife to the disease.
Their idea grew into what is today a staff of six, along with the help of 30 part-time volunteers, who work in an office at the Westchester County Airport to arrange more than 2,500 patient flights per year.
Executive Director Peter Fleiss hopes to bring renewed attention to the organization via the 50,000th flight, with the ultimate goal of letting cancer patients know they have options when faced with the often daunting task of arranging travel to receive treatment.
Still, coordinating flights for the roughly 500 patients per month who request assistance can prove difficult. The organization is usually able to fly about half of those who register.
“The problem is, we have more of a need than we have lift capacity,” Fleiss said.
Ultimately, the organization aims to make patients”™ lives and the lives of their families, “considerably less stressful during a very difficult time.”
Along with reducing the emotional stress of travel on patients and their families, CAN allows patients to avoid germ-laden airports and planes.
In the Yerbys”™ case, the ability to hitch a ride on the jet took away much of the usual stresses of commercial travel.
Compared with a commercial flight, which includes a 3-hour trip to the airport, parking, and trying to keep a 1-year-old entertained, the experience flying with CAN was “so much better,” Yerby said.
“The flight over, (Baron) was so calm, so easy to deal with,” Yerby said, also noting that it was “so much easier for Baron, who tends to squirm and get feisty when we fly commercial, because he”™s sitting on our laps and can”™t move around.”
CAN also does not set any income limits for the patients it serves, something the Yerby family appreciates.
“We fall into a gap,” Yerby said, of having too high an income to qualify for aid from certain charities, while still being unable to shoulder the burden of mounting medical and travel expenses.
Fleiss said that the organization is interested in helping patients at all income levels, adding that “quite frankly, it would be difficult to draw a financial line” for potential patients.
Atlanta-based NCR has been working with CAN since 2010.
NCR is among the more than 500 corporations that participate in CAN”™s program, including half of the Fortune 100 and many in the Fortune 500.
