Unless organizers can get a commitment in the next week or so from President Donald Trump that he won't be at his Palm Beach Mar-a-Lago club on April 1, a "Special Day for Special Kids" event at the Boca Raton airport for about 350 ill or disabled children will have to be called off, postponed or moved, an organizer says.
In fact, since the president of the United States usually can’t say where he’ll be tomorrow, it’s all but a done deal that the event won’t happen April 1, the charity’s chair said Monday.
Vital Flight is a Pompano Beach-based non-profit comprised of private pilots, the majority of them in Palm Beach County, who organize free medical flights. The group puts on a festival at the airport for children with disabilities or serious illnesses. This year was to be the seventh annual event.
Besides providing a full day of activities, the group conducts free airplane spins “to share the thrill of flying with children and their families and to give them relief from their daily struggles,” a brochure for the 2016 event says.
The wrench in the machinery is the same set of Secret Service flight restrictions that has caused turmoil at Palm Beach International Airport and shut down the Lantana airport whenever the president is at Mar-a-Lago — which he has been three of his five weekends as chief executive.
Boca Raton is outside the 10-nautical-mile zone that includes PBIA and Lantana. But it is in a 30-nautical-mile zone of restricted activities, including “sightseeing flights.”
Vital Flight chair David Knies, who runs a travel agency in Huntsville, Ala., but has business, personal and charity ties to Palm Beach County, said air traffic controllers at PBIA “seem optimistic” that they could carve out a corridor of departures to the south and west that would allow the “Kids Day” flights.
But the biggest obstacle is the domino effect of the flight restrictions. Knies said corporate jets using PBIA must be cleared — aircraft, cargo and baggage, flight crew and passengers — by the Transportation Security Administration when the restrictions are in place, and “the ones that can’t meet that, or don’t, or won’t, or whatever, the traffic’s spilling into other airports. They’re going to Boca. If they’re there, and parked, there’s not enough room for us to operate.”
Knies said changing the date is an option, but Trump could decide at the last minute to come to Mar-a-Lago for the new weekend, “so we’re still in a pickle.”
He said the group might move the event to the airport in Pahokee or to Stuart, or to Opa-locka, near Miami. But those sites are inconvenient for volunteers and for the kids and their families, he said.
The group needs 30 days to plan the event, so it’s running out of time, Knies said.
“There are some in our group that are more optimistic than others” that the White House will give a firm commitment he said.
Signature Flight Support, a private “fixed base operator” at Boca Raton, has hosted the event, and they are “as pained as everybody else, and heartbroken that we’re in this predicament,” Knies said. A Signature manager didn’t return a call Monday.
Broward Children's Center, a Pompano Beach-based facility for special needs kids, sent two to last year's event, spokeswoman Brianna Ploude said Monday,
“Unfortunately, if the event doesn’t happen, we’ll find something for them to do otherwise,” Ploude said. “But it is something they look forward to and enjoy doing because it is a unique experience for them.”
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