Regarding the airlift...keep in mind that it took six months to move 500,000 troops to the Middle East for Gulf War 1. There are not enough military airplanes to even make a dent in the NO evacuation.
Assuming you could scramble 100 C-130s and 50 C-5, C-141, C17 types (a doubtful probability), you could only board about 15,000 people. The airport would be utter chaos, the roads leading to the airport would be too congested, it just couldn't work.
I hope for the best in NO, but an airlift attempt will create more problems than it would solve.
Damn. Just damn.
Right, even commandeering commercial airliners, I doubt that you could manage more than 30 departures per hour, with say 333 people per departure, is only 10,000 per hour. The planes have to land and load as well.
And I'd guess that the airlines are already moving a good fraction of this flow.