How Grounded Crew Members Helped Rescue France in the Pandemic

It was mid-2020, and the COVID-19 pandemic was escalating across Europe. Every morning, Vadim Feldzer’s phone rang. On the other end: a hospital executive from AP-HP, the network of public hospitals serving Paris. The calls always carried the same urgency—and the same impossible ask: Find us more volunteers. Find anyone who can help. The French hospital system was collapsing under COVID-19’s first wave, and the executive was running out of options.

“He was calling me every day, every day at eight,” recalled Feldzer, head of global communications at Dassault Falcon. “He was so desperate to find people. He needed people.”

Feldzer, a board member at Aviation Sans Frontières, wasn’t a healthcare administrator or medical recruiter. He worked in business aviation. But in the chaotic early months of 2020, when France’s curfew-bound citizens watched daily death toll announcements on television and hospitals in the eastern regions began to fail, traditional boundaries dissolved. 

Aviation Sans Frontières (ASF), the humanitarian organization founded in 1980 and well known for flying missions in sub-Saharan Africa, had mobilized France’s aviation community to transport medical volunteers between overwhelmed facilities. Feldzer, along with his wife, an anesthesiologist, and other business aviation community members—including Charles Aguettant, president of EBAA France—helped coordinate those flights. Through that work, Feldzer made connections with hospital administrators who now approached him for help, knowing he had access to networks they didn’t.

For more than 40 years, ASF has put aviation resources and expertise at the service of humanitarian aid, operating in conflict zones and remote areas of Africa, partnering with UN agencies and NGOs for medical evacuations and supply delivery. The organization is recognized as a public utility in France and holds the distinction of being the first NGO certified as an airline with a European air operator certificate. When Covi-19 struck France, ASF pivoted its mission homeward.

In March 2020, Aviation Sans Frontières immediately mobilized for what Feldzer called the “COVID mission,” a coordinated effort to fly medical volunteers to overwhelmed hospitals. The first flight launched in March 2020, using a Dassault Falcon 8X with a Dassault crew. Within days, the operation expanded dramatically.

Feldzer reached out to his industry contacts. Nicolas Chabbert at Daher offered a TBM 900 demo aircraft. Cédric Lescop at Jetfly, a fractional ownership company operating Pilatus PC-12s and PC-24s, offered his fleet and convinced fractional owners to donate flight hours to the cause. Training schools contributed aircraft. Engineering schools volunteered airplanes. The fleet grew to include more than 20 different aircraft types, from small trainers to business jets.

The crisis was most acute in eastern France at first, where hospitals were crushed under the pandemic’s initial onslaught. “We had been successful in bringing some assistance to them,” Feldzer recalls. Over two to three months between March and May 2020, volunteer pilots flew 600 hours, transporting doctors, nurses, and specialists with critical skills to facilities crying out for help.

The aviation community united with remarkable generosity. “You realize that there are lots of generous people, and generous people united to serve for a good cause,” Feldzer said.

But by late April, the crisis had evolved beyond what wings alone could solve. The pandemic had spread from isolated regional hotspots across all of France. Paris hospitals faced systemic collapse as they operated beyond capacity with exhausted medical personnel. The hospital executive calling Feldzer each morning needed something different: not transport capacity, but human resources. Bodies. Hands. Helpers capable of supporting overwhelmed medical staff.

Feldzer reached out to contacts across Europe—Germany, Norway, Luxembourg—searching for nurses willing to volunteer in French hospitals. He found goodwill in abundance. “I found people who wanted to come to help or save French hospitals, Parisian hospitals,” he said. But pandemic quarantine rules created significant barriers. Crossing borders meant isolation periods of uncertain duration. No one could risk getting trapped away from home with no clear path back. After failed attempts, Feldzer delivered the bad news to his hospital contact: “I’m sorry, so sorry. I tried my best, but it looks like I’m wasting your time.”

At the same time, a flight attendant acquaintance sat grounded at home, along with thousands of crew members across France. Commercial aviation had frozen. This flight attendant kept telling Feldzer that her colleagues—trained in emergency procedures, customer service, conflict de-escalation, and basic medical response—were idle and wanted to do something to help. Flight attendants have skills and capacity, she insisted. They should be able to help. 

“Because I just wanted to offer an option—[even if] that seemed a totally stupid option, but the only one that came to my mind—I said to the guy, ‘Maybe you would be interested in flight attendants,’” Feldzer recalled.

He expected outright rejection. Instead, the hospital’s innovation team identified missions appropriate for flight attendant skills: patient support, COVID-19 testing assistance, and work in nursing homes where facilities had sealed the doors and isolated vulnerable residents from outside contact. “They have special behavior,” Feldzer explained, referencing the extensive training flight crew members receive. “They have, first, skills in medical stuff, but they can calm down people. They can do a lot of things.”

Volunteers aboard a Dassault Falcon 8X, operated in partnership with Aviation Sans Frontières, depart Le Bourget following a two-week assignment at a Paris-region hospital.

Arnaud Heuze, a flight attendant trainer with 26 years of experience at Air France, was in the advance guard of volunteers. He was contacted by Laurent Bertucat, a pilot and ASF ambassador, who invited him to join the civic reserve within Covisan teams, government brigades established to stop COVID-19’s spread. 

“The required qualities—empathy, kindness, adaptability, and teamwork—are shared between medical and aviation professions,” Heuze wrote about his experience. His flight attendant training proved directly applicable—particularly the importance of reassuring patients, just as he would reassure passengers.

After training, Heuze swapped his flight attendant uniform for an investigator’s role, conducting home visits to test for COVID-19 cases, perform personalized health assessments, and provide human support to isolated, elderly, and anxious individuals for whom these visits were sometimes the only contact with the outside world during lockdown.

As ASF ambassador, Heuze helped recruit others. The call went out across French airlines. Air France crew members responded first, but the effort quickly expanded across the industry. “We had people from all the [airlines] in France,” Feldzer said. “We had people from a dozen airlines.”

Working nights at Dassault while coordinating volunteer recruitment, Feldzer tapped his extensive industry contacts. Flight attendants responded in remarkable numbers. By July 2020, hundreds of crew members had volunteered. Some worked directly in AP-HP hospitals, supporting medical staff through the months of exhausting, round-the-clock crisis response. Others staffed nursing homes, bringing care and entertainment to elderly residents cut off from families. Still others joined Covisan teams conducting community testing and prevention work in suburbs and neighborhoods where clusters threatened to reignite the pandemic.

“For doctors, people working in hospitals, it’s been three, four months of work, sometimes days and nights, seven days—it’s been exhausting,” Feldzer explained. “Being reinforced by fresh people, highly motivated, coming from the airlines, even for doctors who are not people working at the airlines normally, it’s very refreshing to have people with a different kind of experience, kinds of jobs that bring a lot of energy, positive energy.”

Gérard Feldzer, ASF’s president, praised the volunteers in an official statement at the time, saying, “The spirit of solidarity, spontaneity, and professionalism of the flight crew, as well as their strong and assiduous commitment over several months, was remarkable and greatly appreciated by caregivers. The continuous training associated with their professions, oriented toward safety and hospitality, contributed to the effectiveness of interventions.”

The Falcon 8X was used to transport volunteers to regions in France impacted by Covid-19.

The scope of the effort was unprecedented. Between April 7 and June 30, 2020, the combined aviation mobilization—transport flights and flight attendant volunteers—represented the largest operational aviation effort in France. As of July 10, 200 flight attendants remained actively deployed in hospitals and nursing homes. When France’s Bastille Day ceremonies that summer honored healthcare providers and others who mobilized against the virus, ASF received special tribute for its teams’ frontline work.

For Heuze, the experience represented a profound purpose during a period of professional paralysis. “Aviation Sans Frontières was involved as a way to not just endure the epidemic but actively contribute to the solution,” he wrote. The work carried forward the same commitment to service that defines both aviation and healthcare: a story of solidarity and resilience through helping the most vulnerable.

The recognition followed. France awarded Heuze the Médaille de l'Aéronautique for his critical role during the pandemic. The program itself earned formal acknowledgment from French authorities for its innovation and effectiveness.

When COVID-19’s second wave struck France in autumn 2020, ASF, AP-HP, and the Regional Health Agency of Ile de France reactivated the system through an online recruitment platform. The aviation community, still experiencing the deepest crisis in its history, with most airliners grounded and crew members furloughed, again responded with volunteer muscle.

The effort represented something larger than emergency response logistics. It demonstrated how specialized professional communities, when mobilized with creativity and urgency, can cross boundaries to address societal crises. The skills flight attendants develop—crisis management, calmness and empathy under pressure, procedural discipline, human connection in confined spaces—translated directly to pandemic healthcare needs in ways no one had imagined before desperation demanded innovation.

“It’s not just about business aviation, or aviation,” Feldzer said. “It’s also flight attendants. All of business and airline aviation. But again—aviation for a good cause.”

Aviation Sans Frontières stated when it was founded, “We could have called ourselves Pilots Without Borders, but it would have been too reductive. From the beginning, we wanted to involve all aviation personnel, both flying and ground-based.” Four decades later, during the worst public health crisis in a century, that inclusive vision proved prophetic. The organization known for flying medical supplies to remote African villages had mobilized its home nation’s entire aviation ecosystem—pilots, mechanics, manufacturers, and hundreds of grounded flight attendants—to save France’s hospitals from collapse.

It started with early morning phone calls and what at first seemed to be an outlandish solution. It ended with airline crew members earning medals for bringing fresh energy, human compassion, and professional discipline to overwhelmed caregivers at their breaking point. The idea and volunteerism of the aviation community saved lives—and revealed unexpected connections between two professions that share, as ASF wrote, “emphasis on thoroughness, humility, and a passionate sense of commitment.”