Haiti Case Study - The Department of Global Health and Social ...

6. On the evening of 15 January, a 115-person team operating under US Transportation
Command (TRANSCOM) arrived to help support the airport team. 83 The TRANSCOM units
worked with the special tactics squadron to bring in five C-17 cargo planes of communication
and airstrip management equipment to relieve the congestion and restart flights. Within 72
hours, the combined airport teams were able to increase the volume of flights handled by the
airport from 30 per day prior to the earthquake, up to 140 flights per day—setting the all-time
record for a single-strip operation in US military history. No accidents occurred and this pace
was maintained for three months. 84
7. This technical achievement allowed flights to enter the country; the next challenge was
how to prioritize them. Personnel from response organizations including militaries brought in
to provide security, supplies to support them, tents, medicines, water, in-kind donations,
equipment, diplomats, movie stars, and thousands of expatriates to be evacuated all needed
to be flown in and/or out. Every country and organization wanted to prioritize the aid it was
sending and in the absence of an internationally agreed upon method for prioritization, those
involved in air traffic control were left to figure it out for themselves. Adding to their challenge
was that, in many cases, flights had no manifest, making it impossible to know how they
should be prioritized compared to flights that had sent TRANSCOM its cargo manifests. In
other cases, according to an interview conducted during the fieldwork for this case, flights
misrepresented their cargo to gain priority entry.
8. Although the US government and military partnered with the Haitian government, and
later with MINUSTAH, on flight prioritization, some global response actors disagreed with the
airport team’s decisions. The prioritization by the US military of “military” supplies in the
initial three days of the response quickly created the impression that the US was, as some
exasperated officials expressed it, “occupying Haiti”—even though the supplies were often
for relief. 85 As flights started arriving with political leaders, US soldiers and their equipment,
and celebrities, Médecins Sans Frontières, which had a flight of critical supplies diverted from
the airport to Miami, delivered one of the more public criticisms of the US military: “What is
unacceptable to us is the priorities,” the group’s spokesperson stated to the media. 86
9. The participants in this study involved with airstrip landing choices described having to
take prioritization decisions based on little data and having to accommodate the conflicting
agendas of multiple stakeholders. For example, in the case of the Médecins Sans Frontières
(MSF) plane, interviewed decision makers reported that the plane—which was low on fuel
and thus had to either land or divert to another airport—could not land because there was
literally nowhere to put the plane at the time they were slotted to arrive because several
aircraft had failed to take off. 87
10. Problems prioritizing flights constituted significant distractions for Haitian health system
leadership as well. “I would often have to interrupt planning meetings to go and welcome
various dignitaries on the tarmac, or negotiate political disagreements,” one participant
remarked. 88 Another noted that having to justify why they had allowed the US military to
control the airport took up significant amounts of time and energy. 89
11. After several weeks the US State Department and US SOUTHCOM, with UNDAC and
World Food Programme (WFP) input evolved a flight slot allocation system where requests
for landing slots were processed by a call in system at US SOUTHCOM. Each requester
received a landing slot time. If the time was inappropriate the requester could then plan
another way to get goods into the country. In terms of balancing competing needs, a system
of thirds was organized such that a third of the flights were for NGOs, a third for diplomats
and a third for military supplies. 90 While this system was more transparent, it was not “needs
based” or driven by priorities noted on the ground. For their part, the Haitian officials
attempting to provide guidance to the US military about which planes to land based on what
supplies were needed in the field were almost totally in the dark.
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