Eastern Airlines flies stranded Americans home amid COVID-19 pandemic
Steve Harfst, Eastern Airlines CEO, and Michael Brett, passenger, discuss Eastern airlines returning Americans who were stranded overseas during the coronavirus pandemic
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Michael Brett, a man from Chicago who was stuck in Ecuador, thanked the president and CEO of Eastern Airlines on “Fox & Friends” on Thursday after the airline brought him back to the United States amid the chaos surrounding the coronavirus pandemic.
“It was a big relief when that thing pulled up to where we were going to board” said Brett, who flew back from Ecuador on Wednesday after visiting a friend who lives in the country.
He added that he got to Ecuador on March 7 and was scheduled to leave on the 24th, but after being in the country for about six days “everything got shut down.”
Brett, who was speaking from Miami, went on to say that he is “certainly doing better now than I was a couple days ago.”
“It was getting a little stressful,” he continued. “It's been a long couple days, couple weeks.”
Thousands of Americans were left stranded abroad in recent days as the coronavirus pandemic forced sweeping travel restrictions and quarantines. Eastern Airlines is one of the U.S. carriers working to bring them home. In fact, an Eastern Airlines flight carrying 240 passengers and crew flew from Ecuador to Miami International Airport on Wednesday night.
The Pennsylvania-based airline has worked with U.S. State Department officials in recent days to coordinate repatriation flights for stranded Americans who are also in Haiti, Argentina, Panama and other international locales.
“We got our first call from an embassy in the country of Guyana needing to get American citizens home,” said Steve Harfst, the president & CEO of Eastern Airlines. “After we operated that flight from Georgetown, Guyana, we reached out to the repatriation task force and they put an email blast out to all the embassies and posts in Central and South America and then our phone started ringing and since then we have flown from 12 different countries and brought home over 7700 people.”
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Host Brian Kilmeade asked Harfst what his role is going to be in the future.
“We’ll do everything we can to bring them home,” Harfst said in response. “It’s really a story about people.”
He added, “We are a small company. We got 187 employees and eight airplanes and they’ve all volunteered to go out and selflessly serve our country and get these people home.
“It's really about getting people home. I can't say enough about our employees who have selflessly put themselves out there to help people get home and it’s really an amazing story and I couldn't be more proud of our people,” Harfst went on to say.
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Brett said he is currently trying to get back to Chicago, “but everything has been cancelled.”
“I have a flight tentatively speaking, but we’ll see. I'm not too optimistic,” he continued.
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