Alaska woman drops Thanksgiving turkeys from plane in effort to feed neighbors who live ‘off-grid’

Alaska pilot Esther Sanderlin has dropped “turkey bombs” from her plane for the past three years and hopes to turn her mission into a nonprofit.

It’s a bird! It’s a plane! These are… frozen turkeys?

Residents living in Skwentna and the western Susitna Valley of Alaska received their Thanksgiving dinner in a very unusual way. It’s a common belief that turkeys can’t fly, but it seems they can, at least in Alaska.

For the past three years, local pilot Esther Sanderlin has dropped what local media call “turkey bombs” near her fellow Alaskans who live off the road system. After hearing one of his new neighbors explain that squirrel meat would be his protein of choice for Thanksgiving dinner, a new personal mission began.

“I was visiting our new neighbor and they were talking about splitting a squirrel into thirds for dinner, and that it didn’t really go very far,” Sanderlin told NBC Alaska affiliate KTUU on Monday, November 25. “And I just had a thought at that moment, ‘You know what, I’m going to drop them a turkey for Thanksgiving,’ because I recently rebuilt my first plane with my dad and so I can do that very easily. “

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Crossing frozen terrain, especially without a nearby road network, can make it difficult for locals looking for a hot meal for the holidays, but Sanderlin’s airborne delivery system gives it an edge.

“During the freeze, you can’t really move around, so you can’t move around,” she said. “But you can fly as long as you don’t land.”

But Sanderlin isn’t the first in her community to knock turkeys out of the sky. In fact, she got the idea from someone who did the same thing for her neighborhood while she was growing up in Alaska, and she decided it was time for her to pay it forward.

“We had a friend, a neighbor who would airdrop turkeys to my family and other families in the neighborhood,” she recalls. “It has had a huge impact on my life and the lives of others in the community.”

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This year, she’s dropping about 30 to 40 turkeys to make sure her neighbors have a nice, hot meal to gobble up for Thanksgiving, but she hopes to do even more in the future and turn her personal mission into a nonprofit organization. lucrative so that it can achieve more. people across Alaska.

“My vision is to reach more remote areas of Alaska,” she said. “Because there are so many families living off-grid. »