Tessa Coulter cuts the engine of her little yellow Cessna 150 and hops out onto the tarmac.
Unusual cargo is normal for her. Today, her passengers have hooves.
“We have two baby goats that are coming over to a new home,” she said. “They're from ʻUpolu, Big Island.”
Coulter is a commercially licensed pilot who volunteers her time and her own plane to fly animals, farm produce, school supplies and other cargo.
“It's really difficult to get animals between the islands because you can't fly anything exotic on an airline. Cats and dogs only,” Coulter explained.
“So even though these guys are totally fine to travel, they would have to do cargo."
She said cargo travel on bigger flights can be harsh for animals. They are dropped off the night before and will sit in a crate with no food or water until takeoff.
"It's just really, really stressful on the animals. So it's easy just to throw them in the back of the plane," she said.
Most of the animals she flies are rescues. “A lot of times it's because a shelter is overwhelmed, or it just doesn't have the resources,” she said.
Coulter even flew a cockatoo in her plane when trying to get animals out of Maui after the Aug. 8 wildfires.
"The guy was moving after the fire, lost his job, and none of the airlines would fly the cockatoo. So we're like, oh, we’ll put him in the back.”
Bianca Vasquez is another Maui-based female pilot who often flies co-pilot with Coulter. She’s training for her instrument rating.
“The fun part, too, is I could use the flight hours because I'm training, so instead of flying an empty plane and just building the time, we're using it to help out other people,” Vasquez explained.
The sky isn't the limit
From guinea pigs to locally grown pumpkins, the little yellow plane has carried it all.
“We flew a one-legged rooster named I-Hop,” Coulter laughed. “Yeah, gosh, we’ve flown cockatoos, parakeets, goats. Done tons of cats. Dogs. Actually, last trip we went to ʻUpolu, we had about 50 pounds of durian in the back.”
They’ve filled the back of the plane with tampons and pads, transporting them to neighbor islands for the Ma’i Movement, a Hawaiʻi initiative for equity in menstrual product access.
“One of the first flights we ever did in this plane after I got it, was we had about 1,500 tampons in the back. So if anything had happened, we would have floated, we would have been fine,” Coulter joked.
Over the summer, they flew donated school supplies for keiki on Moloka’i and Lāna’i.
Immediately in the aftermath of the Maui wildfires, Coulter loaded up her plane to frequently fly into Kapalua with food and essentials for fire victims.
“We really, really realized how important aviation is here in Hawaiʻi,” she said. “We got there and we're like, 'Who do we hand stuff to?' And they're like, 'We don't know. National Guard's not here. FEMA is not here. Red Cross isn't here.' It was amazing to see the whole aviation community mobilize," she said.
Love at first flight
Coulter took her first discovery flight in 2019 and was hooked. She immediately signed up for flight lessons and bought her plane about two and a half years ago.
Vasquez got her start in aviation through the Civil Air Patrol. Now, she wants to inspire keiki to do it too.
“This is possible. You can totally do this,” Vasquez said. “I know it may seem hard. It may seem unfeasible or just super farfetched, but I was also there a couple years ago. I'm a first-generation college student and a first-generation pilot. I would have never thought that this world was available.”
Coulter and Vasquez are working to create a nonprofit called The Little Yellow Plane Project to support their volunteer work.
Coulter went to college for mechanical engineering but now works in artificial intelligence marketing. As she trains to become a certified flight instructor, she’s also using her experience in AI to develop an online ground school for flight training to increase the safety of Hawaiʻi’s upcoming pilots as they navigate the islands' challenging conditions.
In the meantime, Coulter and Vasquez both work full-time jobs and throttle up the plane in their spare time — proving the sky’s the limit for the little yellow plane and its unusual cargo.
