6 days ago
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New York|He’d Flown Hundreds of Dogs Out of Danger. He Wanted to ‘Save One More.’
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/29/nyregion/seuk-kim-rescue-dog-pilot.html
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Seuk Kim was loitering cheerfully on the tarmac of Culpeper Regional Airport in Northern Virginia one afternoon last November.
He had a lot to be cheerful about. Just a few years earlier, Mr. Kim, a gregarious father of three, was anxiously leaving a stable career to pursue a childhood dream of flying. Now, at 49, he had a pilot’s license, his own single-engine plane and, as he proudly told his friends, a job lined up with a charter airline.
On this day, though, he was indulging in a passion project: volunteering as a transport pilot for shelter animals, joining a small fleet of planes that would help relocate 23 dogs and 12 cats to rescue organizations around the Northeast.
Among the dogs taking flight that afternoon was a 1-year-old Yorkshire terrier mix named Pluto, who had been discovered astray six weeks earlier along a highway in rural Georgia. Now Pluto found himself on a 1,000-mile odyssey that would carry him, in a quirky bit of fate, from an animal shelter just outside Albany, Ga., to an organization just outside Albany, N.Y.
Mr. Kim, petting and cooing at the animals on the tarmac, would be his chaperone for the final leg of the trip.
After a 20-minute layover and a few minor comforts — sips of water from a bowl, nibbles of freeze-dried liver, a couple of affectionate scratches behind the ear — Pluto and three other dogs were shepherded into Mr. Kim’s plane, a Mooney M20J. They nestled into crates that were padded with blankets and secured inside the cramped cabin with bungee cords.
