So, the other day I was chilling in Old Fangak in South Sudan and I thought, “man, this
Fangak sure is old.
I think I’m gonna take a vacation to New Fangak.”
One lengthy review process and 275 USD later, I was kicking back on the 15 minute flight
across the river from Old Fangak to New Fangak.
Now, you might be wondering, what kind of airline is flying a route from this remote
farming town in the middle of South Sudan to this other remote farming town in the middle
of South Sudan?
Well, dear viewer, let me introduce you to the United Nations Humanitarian Air Service,
the only airline dedicated to going to all of the places that no other airline wants
to go.
This airline is actually managed by the World Food Programme, which is the UN’s program
for… world food, basically.
“Now Sam,” you might be saying, “I’m an aviation expert and I know that planes
aren’t food, so what business does this food assistance program have managing a passenger
airline for the largest international organization in the world?”
Well, the answer is a little complicated, but it starts with this place: the Sahel.
All you really need to know about the Sahel is that this region is basically party central,
if by “party” you mean “famine.”
Back in the 1970s—in the midst of one of these famines—the World Food Programme was
struggling to deliver aid; infrastructure on the ground wasn’t developed enough, and
all of their Grubhub drivers were getting lost.
So, the WFP organized 30 cargo aircraft from 12 different air forces to fly over the region
and drop specially marked bags of food near population centers over the course of three
years.
The WFP continued to carry out larger and larger aerial operations over the next couple
of decades—like Lifeline Sudan, where they had to figure out how to airdrop 1.5 million
tons of food into Sudan while somehow convincing both sides of a civil war to not kill them—and
they had gotten so good at coordinating aerial logistics that, in 2003, the UN decided to
consolidate all of their aviation services under one brand-new airline, and put the WFP
in charge of it.
Now, obviously it makes sense that the UN has plenty of cargo and people to move around,
but the real question is: why do they need their own airline to do it?
Y’know, Hooters has cargo and people to move around too, but you don’t see Hooters
Air serving your local airport.
And this is because, basically, the UN only has two other options.
The first would be to use military aircraft to move their stuff around, like they did
before UNHAS existed.
And, admittedly, the UN does use government-supplied planes, but only for their peacekeeping operations—like
intervening in a civil war or just kind of hanging out while a genocide happens.
They tend to draw the line, however, when it comes to their humanitarian operations,
like providing a region with food or medical supplies.
The UN has to keep these two branches pretty much completely separate, because they need
their humanitarian aid workers to be a politically neutral entity, lest they be shot at or canceled
on Twitter.
The other option, then, would be to move their humanitarian workers with commercial airlines.
But as you might imagine, that doesn’t work for… a lot of reasons.
The main one is that these workers often need to be deployed to dangerous or unstable regions,
and the overlap between “deadly warzones” and “places that commercial airlines will
fly” is virtually 0, with the exception of Newark International Airport.
Just as a fairly recent example, let’s talk about what happened in Afghanistan last year.
After the US military pulled out of the country and the Taliban took power, every commercial
airline got together and said, “hey, we really don’t want the Taliban doing air
traffic control for us,” and the Taliban said “we also don’t want the Taliban doing
air traffic control for you, so just go ahead and stop sending flights here.”
With no international government presence and no commercial flight routes, Afghanistan
would’ve been entirely cut off from aid if not for the UNHAS.
Within a week of the takeover, the UN’s airline had relocated its planes to Islamabad
for repairs, and less than a week after that, they were already resuming flights back into
Afghanistan.
By February, the map of their routes within the country looked like this—a better public
transit network than most American cities have.
Now, obviously, UNHAS doesn’t operate like any normal airline; for one, you have to have
a legitimate reason to take the flight that you’re taking—a rule that I know for certain
doesn’t exist on other airlines, cough, cough, please go watch our new channel.
The UNHAS will typically only book you if you’re on some kind of humanitarian mission
for the UN or some other charitable NGO; and in case you were wondering, it turns out that
being a YouTuber who likes to talk about planes is not a humanitarian mission.
The main reason for this restriction is that although they charge money like any other
airline, the UNHAS has pretty limited resources; across the 23 countries they operate in, they
only have 75 aircraft, most of which they don’t even own—they just charter them
from other airlines.
Their actual fleet consists of just 28 aircraft, and only two are real big-boy airplanes: one
Boeing 767 and one Airbus A320.
Most of their planes are much smaller, with the bulk of their fleet being made up of Embraer
ERJ-145s and De Havilland Canada DHC-8s, plus a couple of helicopters which, honestly, shouldn’t
even count.
Now, this tiny little airline is one of the best practical problem-solving organizations
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