He'd Flown Hundreds of Dogs Out of Danger. He Wanted to ‘Save One More.'

New York Times

29-01-2025

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.
When Mr. Kim started his engine, its sudden roar caused a Pomeranian near the runway to jump out of a volunteer's arms, sending several humans scrambling after him.
Glancing out the window, Mr. Kim smiled at the commotion.
Then he took off. It was not a long trip. He had told his wife he would be home for dinner. But the pilot and the dogs in his custody would encounter storm clouds on the flight. And not all of them would reach their destination.
'I want to save one more'
It was a restless spirit that led the pilot to the skies.
Born in Seoul, Mr. Kim spent his early childhood romping through the buzzing market where his mother owned a traditional Korean clothing store, eating spicy rice cakes from street vendors and riding on the back of his father's motorcycle. He never quite lost that yearning for speed.
When he was 9, his family moved to Burke, Va., a suburb of Washington, where early bouts of culture shock and struggles in E.S.L. classes quickly gave way to a wholesale embrace of his new American life. He bent the pronunciation of his first name — from 'Sae-wook' to 'Sook' — to accommodate the American tongue. He and his older brother, Sejin, excelled in school and competed on the local motocross circuit as teenagers.
After college, he started a career in finance, beginning with a stint on Wall Street. After a few years, he moved back to Virginia, married and had three children: Leah, Isaac and Mason.
Even after settling down, Mr. Kim hopscotched among hobbies and interests. He felt lucky that his wife, Anna, encouraged his capricious pursuits.
'Did you know it was a childhood dream of mine to fly?' Mr. Kim asked his wife, seemingly out of the blue, in 2019.
'Why aren't you on it already?' she replied.
With his wife's blessing, Mr. Kim spent almost a year away from home, in Richmond, to complete a flight training program. After that, he began compiling the 1,500 hours of flight time required by federal regulators to become a certified commercial pilot.
That was when he heard about Pilots N Paws, an organization that connects volunteer pilots to animal shelters that need transport assistance. Soon he was completing missions, as the pilots call them, every week. Even after he reached 1,500 hours, the point at which many volunteer pilots seem to lose interest, he kept going.
'I want to save one more,' Mr. Kim said often to his wife.
Some people in Mr. Kim's life, though, eyed his new passion with wariness. His brother spent years taking frequent commercial flights for work, but was too scared of prop planes to ever step foot in one. He knew that their mother, Jiho Kim, had her reservations, too.
But Anna Kim had no such hesitations. She knew how conscientious her husband was, and never worried for his safety. She had a simple rule in her marriage and her parenting: You can do everything you want to do, as long as you do everything you're supposed to do.
A Regenerating Crisis
When Pluto was picked up on Oct. 16, along Route 82 in southern Georgia, he became one of the estimated 5.8 million animals in the United States that entered the shelter system in 2024, according to the national database Shelter Animals Count.
The dog lacked identification when he arrived, said Leah Orr, the director of the shelter, Best Friends Humane Society, in Poulan, Ga. In such cases, her staff cycles through letters of the alphabet to assign names; that day it was P.
Pluto was an 'all-around happy dog,' Ms. Orr said. And yet he now risked joining the more than 600,000 animals that would be euthanized that year after failing to be adopted.
Those in the animal welfare community describe an endlessly regenerating crisis, concentrated in areas of the South, where, they say, numerous factors — shortages in veterinary care, different norms around pet ownership, the warmer climate — contribute to an epidemic of overflowing shelters and needless death.
Among the only lifelines for these animals, then, is to be relocated to a place with more resources and more potential for adoption.
That strategy has worked for Ms. Orr's shelter. Before she took over, roughly half of its animals were being euthanized, she said. Today, hardly any meet that fate, thanks in part to an aggressive strategy of transporting animals to the North.
Pluto's journey, then, was fairly typical: First, a rescue organization signaled that it could take him and two other dogs from the shelter. Then a separate group of volunteers sprung into action to oversee their safe passage.
Ground transport, for these purposes, can be grueling and inefficient. Some years ago, loosely organized networks of volunteer pilots began emerging with the aim of accelerating the process.
And so, on Nov. 24, Ms. Orr put Pluto and two other dogs — a pair of puppies named Whiskey and Lisa — into a van and shuttled them to Southwest Georgia Regional Airport. There, they boarded a twin-engine Cessna 414, which would take them and more than two dozen other dogs and cats as far as Virginia, where the animals would then be put on other planes to their final destinations.
Onto Pluto's crate, volunteers stuck a slip of tape with the letters 'N.Y.' scribbled on it.
'Bring home leftovers'
Around midday on Nov. 24, Mr. Kim said goodbye to his family and left for the airport. Ms. Kim and the children were headed to her parents' house for lunch, a seafood boil, and while Mr. Kim had hoped to join them, he risked being late for his flight, so he went ahead without eating.
'Bring home leftovers,' he said to his wife, 'and I'll have them for dinner.'
Wearing a gray tracksuit, a baseball cap and sunglasses, Mr. Kim drove to Manassas Regional Airport, where he kept his plane, and flew 14 minutes to Culpeper Airport, where the rescue volunteers were assembling. By 3:31 p.m. he was airborne with the dogs, first taking an arced path to Harford County Airport, in Churchville, Md., to drop off a fourth dog, Money, whose rescue he had separately arranged.
After 22 minutes on the ground there, he set off again, at 4:43, toward Albany.
Some pilots were all business, but Mr. Kim liked to interact with his passengers, to talk to them and scratch them and take selfies with them. They were in close quarters, after all, inside a cabin roughly the size of a compact SUV.
Just west of Philadelphia, Mr. Kim heard his friend and fellow rescue pilot, Kley Parkhurst, on the radio speaking to air traffic control. Realizing they were within a couple miles or so of each other, the two men bantered for a few minutes from their respective cockpits before going their own ways.
Mr. Kim and Mr. Parkhurst, who each flew dozens of missions a year, frequently discussed the technical aspects of their hobby and, like all pilots, were aware of its hazards.
'There are pilots who won't fly a single-engine plane, pilots who won't fly at night, pilots who won't fly over mountains, pilots who won't fly in any kind of weather,' Mr. Parkhurst said.
Each one of those elements — darkness, rough terrain, adverse weather — was materializing that evening as Mr. Kim's single-engine plane glided toward New York.
'Mom, this is real'
As Mr. Kim coasted toward Albany, Ms. Kim, anticipating a late dinner with him that night, lay down for a late-afternoon nap.
She snapped to attention, though, at 6:10 p.m., when her phone vibrated with an unusual text message from her husband's number. It was an automated SOS alert, noting that she had been listed as a contact in the event of an emergency.
Confused, she carried her phone over to her daughter.
'Mom,' Leah Kim, 16, said to her mother, 'this is real.'
Over the next quarter-hour, the half-dozen or so people following Mr. Kim's progress were simultaneously staggering to the same realization. His plane had disappeared from their flight trackers. He was not answering text messages. His arrival time at Albany International Airport had come and gone.
Everyone was texting everyone else. Maybe he had gotten lost. Or perhaps he had diverted somewhere for a cheap tank of fuel, as he was known to do.
But as the minutes ticked away, the list of possible outcomes grew chillingly small.
Back at home, Ms. Kim kept calling her husband's phone, which kept ringing. She imagined him immobilized somewhere, alive but unable to answer it. She kept wondering if she might hear his voice.
Local authorities by then were learning that Mr. Kim's plane had made an unplanned descent into a remote area of the Catskill Mountains, and a team of police officers, firefighters and forest rangers was mobilizing toward the ridge where his phone had last pinged.
On a normal day, the mountainside onto which Mr. Kim's plane had disappeared could be traversed on foot. But there were 14 inches of snow on the ground that night and waves of sleet lashing down from the dark sky.
This meant the police could not deploy helicopters and drones to assist in the search. Riding utility task vehicles and four-wheelers, rescue team members could get only within a mile of his presumed location. The rest of the path they negotiated on snowshoes.
It took until 9:30 p.m. for the first team of rescuers to reach the general search area. It was not until 11:38 p.m. that they located the wreckage of the plane. It had come apart after piercing a stand of trees at 140 miles per hour.
Two hours later, they found Mr. Kim's body.
A preliminary accident report from the National Transportation Safety Board, released in December, would state that Mr. Kim had been in contact with air traffic control in the minutes before the crash. Around 6:02 p.m. he reported 'moderate to heavy' turbulence. Within a couple of minutes, he descended from an elevation of 5,000 feet to 4,300 feet and reported that the turbulence had subsided to 'light to moderate.'
That was Mr. Kim's last transmission, the report stated. He never made a distress call.
Around 2:30 a.m., Ms. Kim received a call from the sheriff's office in Greene County, N.Y., confirming her worst fears. She was alone, having sent her teenagers to bed hours earlier. It was a school night. She called Mr. Kim's brother, who had taken a commercial flight to Albany after Mr. Kim was reported missing. She considered calling her mother-in-law, but decided against it.
'Let her have one more night of rest,' Ms. Kim thought.
The rescue team members remained on the scene through the night. They were aware that Mr. Kim had been chaperoning three dogs. Lisa, one of the puppies, was found dead in the wreckage.
But then, to the rescuers' amazement, they discovered Whiskey, the other puppy, burrowed into the snow. His legs were injured and he was clearly shaken up, but somehow alive.
Finally, at 1:30 p.m. the following afternoon, more than 18 hours after the crash, the rescue workers glimpsed some movement on the ridge above them. One of the firefighters whistled and waved. A little brown dog scurried down to meet them.
It was Pluto. He was, astoundingly, unharmed.
One Good Home, One Empty One
When Anna Kim got to her mother-in-law's home the day after the crash, she found herself unable to speak. She sat and cried as someone else delivered the news.
Mr. Kim's extended family assembled there that day and returned for several days thereafter — to cry together, to eat together, to simply be together. He had died four days before Thanksgiving, and some of them assumed that their annual gathering, hosted always by Mr. Kim's mother, Jiho, would not take place. But Anna Kim insisted that it go on.
On Thanksgiving morning, she and her children raided Mr. Kim's wardrobe. He was a lover of graphic T-shirts, and they picked out four of his favorites to wear to dinner. As the extended family, about two dozen people in all, tucked into a generous spread — turkey, duck, prime rib, bowls of kimchi, platters of sushi — they shared stories about him, and laughed.
'I didn't want Thanksgiving to be sad,' Ms. Kim said. 'Because if it was sad this year, then it would always be.'
As Mr. Kim's family navigated this period of turmoil in Virginia, Pluto was for the first time finding a measure of peace in New York.
The story of the dogs who defied death was reported widely in the news media. Forsaken only weeks earlier, Pluto was suddenly famous, with people clamoring to take him in. Within days, more than 100 families from around the country had inquired about adopting him. (Whiskey received veterinary treatment and remained in foster care while recovering from his injuries.)
Pluto was placed with Stephen and Rachel Clemens, a couple from Averill Park, N.Y., whose home stands in a family compound spread over 100 wooded acres. They renamed him Jack, in honor of a family member who died the same day they brought him home.
'He survived a plane crash, so he was destined for a good life,' Ms. Clemens said. 'He needed a good home, and we knew we could provide that.'
But some involved in the dog's harrowing journey found themselves somewhat troubled by its implications, seeing it as emblematic of so much of what was wrong with the current state of animal welfare.
Several of the families who reached out about adopting him, for instance, lived in Georgia.
'It's ironic for someone to reach out to New York to adopt a dog they could have adopted a few weeks ago in their backyard,' said Maggie Jackman Pryor, director of the Animal Shelter of Schoharie Valley, which coordinated Pluto's adoption.
Carol Frey, who briefly fostered Pluto in the aftermath of the accident, was even more blunt: 'Why not go to your local shelter? Chances are there is one just like this one. Someone had to die? A human had to die for all these people to want this dog. It's kind of messed up.'
Back in Virginia, Sejin Kim was struggling, too, to wrap his mind around his brother's death and the outpouring of praise and emotion his story was engendering across the country. He was stunned, like everyone else, that the dogs had survived and that his brother had, in this way, completed his mission. But that fact, he realized, gave him no solace.
The notion that his brother's death was meaningful, that it was somehow more tolerable because he had lived a so-called full life, that he had 'died doing what he loved,' at times made him cringe.
'If I told that to my mom, she'd probably slap me — she doesn't want to hear that,' Sejin Kim said. 'He did a lot of good things. He did a lot of stuff when he was alive. But we all want him back. And would we trade all the good deeds he did to have him back? Any day, in a split second.'
On Dec. 5, Seuk Kim was laid to rest at a cemetery in Fairfax, Va., steps from his father's grave. He was buried in one of his beloved T-shirts — with the phrase 'Can I pet your dog?' splashed across the chest — and a Mets baseball cap.
Before the ceremony, in a solitary, unfiltered moment, Sejin Kim stared into his brother's casket and cursed him out.
'He caused so much pain and grief, especially to my mom, his family, my family, everybody,' he said.
Then, he told him he loved him.
Time moved slowly for the family in the weeks that followed.
Even once her most intense periods of grieving had passed, Anna Kim found it difficult to ponder the years to come without her husband. She focused instead on his memory.
As she and her children tried to reestablish some semblance of normalcy to their lives, they agreed they would take each day as it came, one at a time, together.
It was almost two weeks after the crash when Ms. Kim took the leftovers she had saved to eat with her husband out of the refrigerator and mustered the strength, at last, to throw them away.