It would seem like that a guy with some capital, ought to go out and buy a couple of medium-sized jets...refit them...and then prepare to rent them out to transport all these folks around. Throw some Brazilian pilots into them, go cheap, and makes tons of profit off Gov’t contracts.
The CDC for years had that plane under contract but the cost of never used “standby” became too high, so they abandoned it.
I don’t the right and wrong of the budget issues, but here are some of the details.
“And it turns out there’s only one jet in the world — operated by a small private plane charter company in Georgia — with a special transport tube that allows medical personnel to treat Ebola patients while in flight.
The Atlanta-based Centers for Disease and Prevention helped develop the “air transport bio-containment unit” under a multiyear project with the Phoenix Air Group in Georgia in 2006, but the agency later decided that it couldn’t afford to maintain “stand-by” capability, and so the equipment was warehoused, contract records show.”
“While it was once at the beck and call of the CDC under a previous contract, the company recently had to be hired back by the State Department this year at a cost of nearly $5 million for a six-month sole-source contract.
“Had the department not moved very quickly to establish its own exclusive contract, our negotiating position would have shifted, placing [U.S. government] personnel and private citizens at risk,” State Department officials wrote in the contract justification last month.”