The broader process starts after daylight each morning. The company aims to "turn" each aircraft 20 minutes after it lands. There's a ground team waiting for us, and there's a hand-off ," Borton explains. Quest's pit stops (the aircraft make 88 daily landings in 63 domestic locations) often see planes simultaneously being re-fueled and unloaded/loaded while pilots do their next pre-takeoff checks and any flight plan updates. "It's like a NASCAR pit crew when we land. Like more routine samples, they're managed with competition-like teamwork. That freed up about 50-percent capacity in all of our aircraft." All specimens are packaged for the aircraft in the same sterile format, including the many COVID-19 specimens that Quest has been transporting to and from 12 different laboratory facilities during the crisis. "So we went ahead and patented our own soft-sided coolers. Well over a decade ago, Quest recognized that the traditional hard coolers it transported specimens in had a lot of "empty air" inside, Borton says. It's a good fit in terms of size for an operation that's always assessing its efficiency, including the utilization of cargo space. Its load capacity and middle-ground speed/altitude/fuel consumption qualities are encouraging the company to acquire more. Photo by Steve Hockstein/īut the PC-12 is likely the future of the Quest fleet. When SmithKline Beecham sold its lab operations to Quest Diagnostics in 1999, the specimen-transport fleet went with it. In the beginning, pilots flew twin-engined Cessna 310s, though they were later joined by faster turboprop TBM 700 business aircraft. It was launched in 1988 as part of the lab operation of the pharmaceutical company SmithKline Beecham. "We actually ran under life-guard status on that day." Quest airplanes were intercepted by fighters several times for positive identification, but they kept on moving specimens. That was well over a decade after the genesis of Quest's fleet. "We were just about the only ones in the air outside the government," Quest Senior Director of National Air Logistics Scott Borton remembers. Quest aircraft have flown in empty skies before, on September 11, 2001, for example. With each Quest PC-12 aloft in the darkened skies ride the hopes and anxieties of patients waiting for results. Take a look at or at 10 or 11pm in the evening and you'll see.Ĭhances are, if you click on the icon of a small aircraft, it will have the identifier " LBQ" and the call-sign "LabQuest. There are remarkably few aircraft in the air over America at night in this time of COVID-19. That way, the lab results for the person from whom the specimen comes are available by 8am a day or two later. Quest pilots' mission to collect and transport this valuable cargo has the same goal every night: to gather the material and get it safely back to one of Quest's labs by 2am. The airplane is part of the 25-strong specimen-transport fleet of Quest Diagnostics, one of the two leading companies in the medical lab services market. They're aboard a Pilatus PC-12 turboprop business aircraft, collected from airports where they've been delivered from laboratories, doctors' offices, and hospitals. Behind him are 76 soft-sided coolers holding the physical data on which modern medicine depends-samples of blood, urine, and tissue from individuals around the country. But somewhere above, a pilot bathed in the glow of avionics is looking up from his instrument panel into the night. It's pretty quiet out there these days, particularly after you've gone to bed. Quest Diagnostics reader comments 65 with
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