Remembering the Lahaina Airlift
Ellen Massey is a pilot on the islands of Hawai'i. The following is a transcript from the Hawai'i Radio Hour where Ellen details her experience delivering supplies to first responders on Lahaina during the 2023 Wildfires
Original Airdate: August 3, 2025
Network: Hawai'i Radio Hour
Full Audio Version: Link
The tower controller's voice was calm in my headset: “Winds 065 degrees at 25 knots.”
I ran a quick mental calculation: With winds from the east-northeast and a runway oriented almost north, that meant a 17 or 18 knot crosswind. Right at the limit of what the tiny, heavily loaded airplane could handle.
That meant I'd have to come in faster than normal, to retain as much control as possible.
I told myself to be ready to go around. This was bordering on dangerous. If it got to be too dangerous, I had to be ready to abandon the landing attempt.
Out the window to my right, I could see a ragged plume of smoke, where the Maui wildfires were still smoldering.
Again, the tower controller's voice was calm in my headset: “Winds 080 at 25 gusting 32.”
I turned onto final approach. Gusting to 32 knots? And from almost perpendicular to the runway? That was a much MUCH stronger crosswind.
I knew it was well beyond the airplane's “demonstrated crosswind component.” That was the number that the manufacturer's test pilots – flying back in the 1970s – when this plane I was flying was built – had determined that this type of little airplane could handle.
Unlike weight or center of gravity, demonstrated crosswind component – the number in my head at that moment – is not an operating limitation, so there was nothing “legal” preventing me from making this landing.
But the laws of physics might.
I would have to go around and try again.
Winds like this – and inattention or poor judgment or ignorance or bad luck – have flipped over tiny airplanes like this one; caused them to run off runways; crumpled propellers; it's not a good list.
I was hardly there to become my own emergency. I was not there to divert firemen and EMTs away from the very people I was there to help.
I prepared the aircraft for landing anyway, just in case. Maybe a lull in the wind would come.
The gusts had bumped me around me for almost the entire flight. But especially since I had passed above the gray and white ashes of Lahaina: that beautiful historic town, home to nearly 13,000 people just three days before this flight.
Elsewhere on Maui, a few fires were still burning. Helicopter pilots I knew were dumping bucket after bucket to put them out.
First responders on the ground were overwhelmed with burn victims and with searching for the missing.
This August 8th marked two years since the wildfires on Maui. Those fires were some of the deadliest in the last century of US history, leaving 102 people dead and over 5,000 without homes.
In that first week of August 2023, a “perfect storm” of conditions triangulated to produce the rapid and devastating fires. Hawai`i is geographically the most remote archipelago in the world, 2,400 miles from the nearest landmass. It has a fragile ecosystem whose native plants and animals are without many natural defenses against invasive species. In recent decades, non-native grasses have spread widely in the drier areas. While these grasses have unfortunately been around for a long time, it's been the decline in agriculture that has led to their rampant spread across no-longer-managed lands. This increase in fuel for fires, combined with changing weather conditions, drought, and decreased water availability for fire-fighting, has greatly increased the state's susceptibility to damaging wildfires.
In early August 2023, a strong high pressure system lay north of the Islands, and to the south lay Hurricane Dora, maintaining Category 4 strength longer than any Pacific hurricane in 50 years. The pressure differential between the high to the north and the deep low of the hurricane was the perfect recipe for extreme winds across Hawai`i. Add to this an unusual lack of humidity in the air, and the mountainous terrain that already exacerbates wind speeds and gusts in the Islands, and we had the perfect ingredients for fast-moving, out-of-control fires.
Which is exactly what happened. Fires sparked across Oahu, Big Island, and Maui. And while the fires on Oahu and Big Island were contained, the ones on Maui would go on to make national news.
The extreme winds, clocking in at over 80mph in Lahaina, downed power poles, which ignited brush fires in the dry grasses, which spread uncontrollably. Hundreds of homes burned within minutes.
Three days after the fires had decimated Lahaina, I took off from Kona, on Big Island, in a tiny Cessna loaded to its max weight with burn cream, bandages, food, and other emergency supplies.
As I left, I remembered the last time I had been in Lahaina.
I remembered strolling the waterfront, taking in the historic wooden buildings, the eclectic storefronts, the restaurants, bars, and ice cream parlors.
Local surfers had been washing down their boards at the waterfront park; fishermen were cleaning their catch; and dive boat captains were tidying up their gear in the harbor.
Lahaina's famous giant banyan tree was alive with the twittering of myna birds. Just offshore, a few sailboats rode at anchor, and off in the west the sun was setting in a glory of gold.
I remembered Lahaina as a unique and vibrant place, full of life and joy.
I knew, of course, that it was gone. That was why I was making this flight.
The enormity of what had happened hit me when I saw Lahaina beneath my wing. In ashes. Still smoking. The terror the residents must have felt as they fled for their lives, the utter and complete devastation wrought by the fire.
Out my right window, I was seeing a sight I hope never to see again: of the homes and businesses of my fellow Hawai`i residents reduced to rubble.
I was seeing in person something I had only before seen on TV, a town that looked like it had been bombed.
I had a physical reaction to it. My heart beat faster. My breath was shallower. There was a tightness in my chest. A blurry wetness in my eyes. I had to look away, to take a deep breath, and concentrate on what I was doing.
I couldn't afford to let emotion get in the way of this mission. Flying a small plane in the winds and turbulence I was experiencing is challenging enough without losing concentration.
And I was a relatively low-time pilot. I hadn't yet earned my commercial certificate and this was by far the most demanding flying I had ever done.
All the roads into Lahaina were closed and blocked at this point, and would remain that way for almost two weeks. So the only way people could get the provisions they needed to survive was by air lift, or by small boats landing on the beaches in the surf.
The airstrip at Lahaina is privately owned, and is normally off-limits to aircraft like the one I was flying. This is not necessarily a bad thing: it is perhaps the most challenging runway in the state. The instructor who first taught me to fly has described it as “subject to sustained winds well over 20 knots with low level crossing wind shear and mountain lee side turbulence.” It is not an airstrip for cavalier or inexperienced pilots.
But a small group of pilots across Hawai`i had managed to obtain permission for this relief mission, and I was one of the first to take off for Lahaina.
As I approached the field and contacted the tower controller, I was getting a full dose of this airport's weather hazards. The high winds that had played such an important role in the fire's ferocity had abated, but not enough.
I configured the aircraft for landing, managing the power to keep a stable rate of descent. The gusts buffeted the plane, kicking its wings up and down, hitting me with updrafts and then with strong downdrafts that I had to counter with throttle.
I could see a ravine snaking in front of the runway threshold; I knew that terrain feature would do weird things to the wind just as I was in the most critical phase of flight, low to the ground, at low speed, closing with the runway.
I spotted the windsock to the left of the runway, standing straight out, completely full of wind, and veering this way and that in violent oscillations.
“Wind check?” I asked the tower, my voice surprisingly calm.
I opened the throttle and pitched for best climb speed.
Too gusty, too much crosswind.
I crabbed the airplane into the wind as I climbed, then turned west toward the shoreline, and then south at 900 feet over the beach. The ocean below me was a violent mass of churning whitecaps.
As I came back around for another attempt to land, I heard the tower controller again: “I think you can make it this time, winds are backing to 050. Still cleared to land, runway 2.”
I acknowledged his clearance, straightened out on the final approach course, and noticed that yes, I was not crabbing as aggressively to hold my course.
As I neared that ravine again, I got another wind check. “060 at 26, gusts 30,” the controller told me.
That was right at the limit, a little beyond it in the gusts. I watched the runway, keeping my landing point rock steady. That ravine kicked me up in a bit of rolling turbulence and then kicked me down, but I was ready for it.
I leveled out over the runway, the nose straight along the centerline, and pulled back into the landing flare.
The firemen came rushing out to the plane as I taxied into a parking spot, smiling with relief, and congratulating me on making it.
In minutes my big load of supplies was piled onto carts and disappearing into the firehouse to be distributed among the survivors.
Needing a moment to clear my head before taking off to fly home and load up and do it again, I went into the firehouse to rest in the shade.
I started talking with a couple of the firemen. One of them, very offhandedly, and in a manner belying the urgency in his eyes, said that he'd been “pretty worried when I saw you come in and not land at first.”
That hadn't occurred to me in the moment that I'd made that decision as a pilot, that if I couldn't land, they would spend another day without critical burn cream and food.
Maybe even more than seeing Lahaina, that brought home to me how important this mission really was.
As we talked, I started asking if what I had brought – what people at home on Big Island were donating – was what was most needed.
Pretty soon I'd gone back to the plane to get my clipboard to write down a list of what would be most valuable. Drinking water was on that list, which was going to be a tough one for a small plane with a small payload: water is heavy.
But in the days that followed, I would fly several missions with crates of water. And I would fly first aid supplies, fresh vegetables, canned and dried foods, bedding, tents, toothpaste, soap, baby wipes, diapers, toilet paper, and even Portuguese sweet bread.
The group of pilots and donors I was part of on Big Island would plead with the department of health for five days before we were granted permission to fly a load of insulin. Diabetics in Lahaina were in critical condition. They had been without this life-saving medicine ever since the fires.
I think that flight is the one I am most proud of, knowing that we truly saved lives that day. Over the next two weeks, I flew something close to 20 missions, sometimes making three flights a day.
In that short time I went from being a fairly new pilot, in training for a commercial certificate, to living the life of a cargo pilot, with a packed schedule and an urgency to my flying that had never existed before.
My fellow pilots from Big Island, from O`ahu, and from Kahului on Maui combined to fly many more.
Together we transported tens of thousands of pounds of donated supplies. The tour operators pitched in, too, sending their helicopters and larger airplanes across the channel to Maui full of drinking water and other equipment. People talk about the aloha spirit, and in all the time I've lived in Hawai`i, never have I seen it so fully embodied than in the little community of aviators, putting their lives entirely on pause while they volunteered in those first days after the fires.
Eventually FEMA and other disaster relief organizations stepped in, and eventually the roads were cleared and reopened. The rebuilding process has been slow but it is moving forward.
But in those early days, it was ordinary citizens – boaters, pilots, and residents organizing, donating, and loading – who rose to meet the tragedy.
Our Ohana came together in a way I was honored to be a part of. Today, whenever I fly past Lahaina, I remember that time both with great sadness, and with awe at how our resilient and caring community responded.
