Have the Doctors Without Borders flights landed in Haiti yet?

COLONEL ELTON: I'm Colonel Buck Elton from Florida. On Wednesday, we were alerted to deploy a force down here, and arrived with the first three aircraft approximately at 7:00 p.m. on Wednesday, with a mission to open up the airfield and provide security, assist with medivac and rescue efforts, and establish command and control.

When we arrived there was no electricity, no communication and no support. 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. 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.

The tower and the terminal has been condemned due to damage, so all of our operations are done in the grass between the runway and the ramp. It's done via radio control from our controllers that are in contact with the Haitian approach control that does not have an operational radar or any navigational aids to assist the arrival of the aircraft, and with a communications link that we have back to the Haitian flight operations coordination center back at Tendell (phonetic) Air Force Base in Florida.

And what we do is create slot times for a flow control to stagger the arriving aircraft so that we can time their arrival with the departure of another aircraft, so that we can maximize the number of relief supplies and personnel that are arriving on the aircraft, keep them on the ground for the minimum amount of time, and then depart them. Our intent is to, as soon as one aircraft departs we have another one arrive. But the way this airport is configured, there's a single taxiway in the middle of the aircraft that goes from the runway to the ramp, so every time we want to taxi an aircraft out, we have to get on the active runway, taxi back, and then depart them. So everything takes a little bit longer.

Due to the devastation at the airport and around the city, the material handling equipment when we first arrived was insufficient to be able to offload the massive amount of cargo that was coming in, and much of it was offloaded by hand. On Thursday, we had -- the contingency response group from the Air Force arrived and bring in some more material and handling equipment. And they took responsibility for marshalling the cargo and the passengers as they came off of the airplane.

We continue to coordinate closely with the Haitian airfield manager and the approach control, and assist them as they coordinate with the flight operations coordination center, to prioritize and sequence the aircraft so that we have maximum input into this airfield and we don't have any empty space on the ramp. Unfortunately, we have delays with aircraft breaking, or with material handling equipment breaking, or improperly configured cargo that we have to offload by hand. And while we plan for it to take two or three hours to be on the ground, sometimes it takes as much as seven or eight hours. So when we have aircraft on the ground taking up space, it's not possible to bring in another aircraft. So we end up having a stack of aircraft out that the Haitian approach control is holding until we have space on the airfield to come in.

The airfield has not been closed since we started operation, it has just been full. And as soon as we get one aircraft out we get a similar sized aircraft in. Currently, we're operating with a working maximum aircraft on the ground of one wide-body and five narrow-body aircraft. And the one wide-body is planned for two hours on the ground, and the five narrow-bodies are planned for one hour on the ground. We also have room for three smaller aircraft, and then we fit in as much as we can other aircraft that arrive that we have space for. Any aircraft that can taxi into the grass and get off the ramp that the big aircraft need to be on, we use that option.

We have a little bit of overflow that we use on a real-time manner so that if we do have someone delay we can fill that spot as necessary. And although we had probably -- I think it was 50 diverts, some of them diverted, got fuel and came back; some of them had to divert back to their point of origin -- we've only had a couple within the last couple days, because the flow control and the slot time has worked.

What we've set up here would be similar to running a major airport that has only a certain amount of terminals and a certain amount of capacity to move the cargo through, except doing it without any communication, electricity, or computers. So we've done everything via radio. And after we established communications we were able to get some hard phone lines. We ran 650 feet of phone lines spliced together from our operation center on the ramp up to where the Haitian approach control is, so that we can get immediate access. For three days we were using Foxmite (phonetic) radio to relay that information. So communication was challenging.

QUESTION: Thanks a lot for doing this. My question is about what's happening at the airport. We were getting reports of planes with hospitals being turned away. I realize you have very little space to work with, but I wonder if the prioritizing of things landing is working out better as this goes on.

COLONEL ELTON: Absolutely. This is Colonel Buck Elton again. It gets better every day, as we refine the process. Initially we went from an airfield that had no control or prioritization and it was everyone -- everyone was filing their flight plans and arriving unannounced, and we didn’t know that they were there until they were approximately 20 miles from the field. And we would sequence them in the best we could.

The overwhelming international support to bring humanitarian assistance and disaster relief into this airfield exceeded the capacity of us to get them in and out. We have refined the process at which Southern Command, in coordination with the State Department and USAID and the Haitian government, can set priorities for the slot times which are effectively the scheduled landing times into the airfield, so that we can prioritize important cargo coming in.

The first couple days it was all very important cargo and it was a challenge to turn away any aircraft for an open parking slot. But when we had all of the parking spots occupied, more important cargo would show up. And if they didn’t have enough holding fuel to be able to orbit and wait to come in, they would have to fuel-divert.

In the past -- today we only had two diverts. So the process that we have is efficient. We continue to refine the prioritization and the requirements as we establish better communications with the embassy and with the Haitian government and refine how we get the most important cargo in, in the most efficient way.

And I was just given some data that yesterday, only -- out of 67 civilian flights that we had to plan to come here, we had only had three diverts. Our strategy, to make sure that we did not have any space that was going unoccupied, was to send additional military aircraft with air refueling tanker support so that they could come and orbit over the field, and when there was an available spot without an inbound civilian humanitarian relief flight on the way, we would bring them in and quickly offload and get them out. The military aircraft are configured for faster operations on aircraft and we can use forklifts to offload them, so it goes much faster.

So approximately 40 percent that's military and 60 percent civilian right now. And a lot of that is based on the type of aircraft and the size of aircraft that we can fit on the ramp.