Beyond the Clouds, Rising above Danger

Above the clouds in a small aircraft and not long into her flight, a young woman who wouldn’t look her pilot in the eye five minutes earlier began repeating a question: “When are we going to descend?” Stephanie Lamar showed her the map for the fifth time. They still had an hour to go. Finally, Lamar asked the young woman why she kept asking.

“I want to go through a cloud,” the woman said.

Minutes earlier, this survivor of human trafficking had sat silent at the airport, unable to speak, unwilling to make eye contact. Private investigators and police had shadowed her arrival at the airport, ensuring that her trafficker hadn’t followed. Now, released from the threat on the ground, she wanted to fly through clouds.

Lamar called air traffic control to request a descent and vectors into nearby clouds, amazed at how the woman’s whole demeanor had transformed. They recorded a video for her to keep. By the time they landed, she was asking questions, making plans, and engaging with the world.

“I feel like psychologically, there is a shift that happens when we get in the air,” Lamar said. “We hear over and over, ‘He can’t touch me. This is the first time I felt safe.’”

That transition from fear to hope for the future is at the heart of Freedom Aviation Network. Founded in October 2022 by Lamar and Jared Miller, the Tennessee-based nonprofit mobilizes volunteer pilots and their aircraft to fly survivors of human trafficking to safety, to shelter, to court dates, and to new lives. They provide the service to survivors completely for free. 

Lamar co-founded Freedom Aviation Network after a circuitous path back to aviation that began with a childhood dream, detoured through 15 years of motherhood, and landed at the intersection of flying and humanitarian work through a phone call about a missing girl.

She started flying in 1996, fresh out of college with aspirations of becoming an airline pilot. Then life intervened. She had kids. Flying went on hold.

What brought her back was a chance encounter in England with a 77-year-old pilot who hadn’t earned her certificate until age 50 and then went on to break world records. “I was like, you know what? I still have more life to live,” Lamar recalled. She pursued her flight instructor rating and commercial certificate and started teaching.

Along the way, she got involved with Nashville Peacemakers, a nonprofit founded by a woman whose son had been murdered. The founder ran Mothers Over Murder, working with inner-city residents on forgiveness and trauma recovery. Lamar served as board president for three years. Then came the call that changed everything. The founder needed to reschedule a meeting. One of the mother’s daughters had gone missing. They’d tracked her to Ohio. She was being trafficked. The mother was trying to figure out how to get her back.

Lamar called a friend who worked in human trafficking response. He helped with the situation, but mentioned something that stuck: “Transportation is really an issue with a lot of these things.” The mother ended up driving to Ohio to retrieve her daughter, but Lamar kept thinking about what her friend had said. “I just thought, she’s up in Ohio. I could have flown up there, and that would have been faster.”

She asked her friend directly: Could you use help from volunteer pilots? He said yes.

Lamar and one other pilot became a test group, volunteering to fly survivors. Her initial assumption was that Angel Flight, the established medical transport volunteer network, might be able to help. She reached out to ask. 

However, trafficking victim flights require advocates to accompany survivors, and those advocates need return transportation. The requirements and potential risks were different than a typical medical transportation mission. But the organization provided information about how to get started.

For two years, Lamar waited for calls to fly transportation missions. Only two came. Lamar learned that the nonprofit viewed volunteer pilots as a severely limited resource. If they used Lamar for one flight, they thought, she might not be available for the next urgent case. So they held back. She encouraged the nonprofit to call, letting them know the impression was mistaken.

Lamar and co-founder Jared Miller filed paperwork to establish their own nonprofit. It came back approved in two weeks. At almost the same moment, calls started coming. Fifteen flights in three months. “That overwhelmed me,” Lamar said. She was working as a CFI, making CFI wages. “I started calling all the pilots I knew. ‘Hey, do you want to help with this?’ And they were overwhelmingly responding, ‘Yes.’”

Those became Freedom Aviation Network’s first volunteer pilots. In the first year, they flew around 100 missions.

The organization operates similarly to other charity flight organizations, serving as a conduit between organizations representing those who need help and pilots who can provide transportation. All flight requests come through referrals from advocates or agencies working with survivors. When a request arrives, Freedom Aviation Network contacts eligible pilots in the region. Minimum requirements: a private pilot certificate, 250 hours of flight time, and access to an aircraft with at least four seats. Survivors always fly with an advocate, so seating and sufficient useful load are necessities.

The advocate serves multiple crucial roles. “We never want to put [a trafficking survivor] in a plane with some guy they don’t know taking them across the country,” Lamar explained. “That can be scary for them, too.” The advocate provides a trusted presence, handles any complications, and ensures the pilot doesn’t bear responsibility beyond flying the airplane safely. 

A significant number of flights are rescue missions, involving immediate extractions from dangerous situations. These happen fast, often with little notice. Other missions involve transfers between facilities, home visits for survivors in long-term restoration programs, or trips to court appointments.

The organization categorizes flights as low, medium, or high risk based on information from referring agencies. Most are routine. But the possibility of complications is always present, which is why Freedom Aviation Network emphasizes to pilots: you’re just the pilot. The advocate handles everything else.

That structure has allowed the network to grow despite operating in an environment where word-of-mouth spreads quickly among anti-trafficking nonprofits, but slowly among pilots. “One of the biggest volunteer pilot organizations is Pilots N Paws,” Lamar noted, “and that’s because every time a pilot does a flight, they take a picture of some cute dog, they put it on their social media, and it kind of goes from there. For us, we ask our pilots not to post anything. We don’t want these pictures out there. We don’t want pictures of the girls out there. It’s very private.”

The privacy requirements create barriers to recruitment. Growth happens through aviation publications, podcast appearances, and one-on-one conversations that overcome pilots’ initial concerns.

“The first question I get is about liability,” Lamar said, “which is interesting, because you’re taking on the same liabilities if you’re flying a cancer patient.” When she points that out, pilots usually realize the liability profile isn’t substantially different. “I think there’s more liability in flying cancer patients. These people are probably more with it, but if something goes wrong, they’re going to sue you. These women probably aren’t going to think that way. They’re just kind of trying to survive.”

Perception is the bigger barrier. “When they hear ‘anti-trafficking,’ I think people have seen too many movies,” Lamar said with a chuckle. “They think the trafficker is going to be out there, guns blazing, and it’s a whole showdown, we’re getting shot at, we’re flying off. That’s just not the case. The trafficker couldn’t care less that we have this person. They’re just going to find a new person.”

The scale of the problem is staggering. A 2024 report from the International Labour Organization estimates that, worldwide, forced labor generates $236.4 billion in profits every year, and forced commercial sexual exploitation generates nearly $173 billion of that total. An estimated 27.6 million people are currently exploited globally.

In 2024, the National Human Trafficking Hotline received 32,309 reports of potential trafficking situations involving 21,865 potential victims in the U.S. alone, including 8,024 contacts directly from survivors seeking help. The reported cases included 6,647 sex trafficking situations, 2,220 labor trafficking situations, and 1,360 situations involving both. Among identified victims, 2,666 were minors. Yet these numbers likely represent only a fraction of actual cases. The hotline’s data does not capture the full prevalence of trafficking, only situations that are reported, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation.

Contrary to what many Americans imagine, most trafficking doesn’t involve foreigners smuggled across borders. “Most people that we’ve flown have been U.S. citizens,” Lamar said. The average age of entry into trafficking is around 13. The average time spent in trafficking before finding a way out is 10 years.

When Freedom Aviation Network began, Lamar felt overwhelmed by the impossibility of the problem. “Human trafficking is like a billion-dollar business,” she said. “It’s bigger than the United States music industry.” The organization might fly one person to safety, but millions more remained trapped.

She prayed about it. An image came to her: Jesus as a shepherd, leaving 99 sheep behind to search for the one that was lost. After that, Freedom Aviation Network adopted a guiding principle: “For the One.”

“We’re going to go through this effort,” Lamar said. “We’re going to do this for one person. It’s worth it for that one person. And it makes a difference. It makes a difference in their life.”

The differences show up in moments that carry enormous weight. One survivor said her pilot was very kind to her, that it was the first time in as long as she could remember that someone treated her like a person, and that she knew things were going to be okay at that point.

One survivor was being prayed over during her rescue. The prayer included the phrase, “Let God give you His best.” When she arrived at the airport, her pilot flew a Vision Jet. “God’s best is pretty good!” she commented.

Freedom Aviation Network provides “go bags” that include toiletries, feminine hygiene products, snacks, blankets, and sunglasses, because survivors often leave their situations with nothing. No possessions. No identification. Going through TSA with inadequate ID or none at all can prove deeply traumatizing. Private aviation eliminates that barrier. 

The organization now has nearly 200 volunteer pilots spread across 39 states. They’ve flown hundreds of missions, with five to 10 requests coming in per month from middle Tennessee alone.

One of Freedom Aviation Network’s early volunteers was Philip Porter, a pilot in North Carolina. When a request came in for a rescue mission involving a minor girl and her friend—both leaving their trafficking situations to fly across state lines—Porter called Lamar back about weight and balance with two survivors, two advocates, and the pilot. “Is it okay if a friend and I rent a King Air and we fly these girls to where they need to go?”

They did. The bill came to over $10,000. Afterward, Porter and his friend told Lamar to let them know when they could do it again.

Porter flew numerous missions for Freedom Aviation Network before he and his wife died in an aircraft accident. The organization is establishing an award in his name to honor volunteer pilots who embody his spirit of generous service.

The costs add up quickly. Last year alone, Freedom Aviation Network spent $35,000 on commercial airline tickets for advocates who needed to return home or for situations where general aviation couldn’t meet the need. The organization has since pulled back on commercial ticket purchases while figuring out sustainable funding. Support from corporate flight departments could help the organization’s mission. “They’re always traveling, or they might have an empty leg that they could help with,” Lamar said. So far, cracking that market has proven difficult.

What keeps volunteers coming back is the impact. Survivors say things like, “This is the first time I felt safe,” and “It’s almost like leaving the earth.” For survivors of human trafficking, that sensation carries literal truth. The person who controlled them, who threatened them, who exploited them, often for years, is on the ground. In the clouds, in a four-seat single-engine airplane flown by a stranger who volunteered their Saturday morning and their fuel money, the survivor is untouchable. Freedom Aviation Network has flown almost 200 of those flights. One at a time. “For the one.”