How a private airline in Cartersville, Georgia, became the government’s go-to evacuation system for Ebola, and, eventually, everything else.

Phoenix Air itself had been around since the early 1970s, when Dent Thompson’s brother Mark had started it as a skydiving school after returning from piloting helicopters in Vietnam. Over the intervening decades, the airline had evolved from its original charter into the business of doing “difficult things.” These were, as Dent says, aviation tasks so complex, paperwork-intensive, and/or unenviable that, once you’d established yourself as the only airline willing to do them, you could have all the contracts you wanted.