Flying Magazine: Pulse Charter Connect Seeks to Shake Up Aerial Organ Transport

Pilot-turned-founder Laura Epstein is tackling one of the most pressing challenges in aerial logistics.

According to the United Network of Organ Sharing (UNOS), there are more than 100,000 people in the U.S. waiting for an organ transplant. But each year only about 45,000 transplants are performed, and more than 28,000 donated organs are wasted.

An average of 13 people per day die waiting for a transplant, per UNOS. Epstein founded Pulse Charter Connect to tackle one of the biggest factors she believes is driving those outcomes—communication between air charters and hospitals.

“Rather than the transplant coordinator making a series of phone calls to then have everybody basically playing phone tag across the board with brokers, intermediaries, and the actual charter companies,” Epstein told FLYING, “we expedited that by making it all one system that will send out all of the requests to the different parties in parallel.”

Until August, UNOS held a 40-year exclusive contract to handle organ allocation for the federal Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network. But the dissolution of that agreement by Congress has opened the door for companies like Pulse Charter Connect to shake up the space.

The company in April 2024 launched a platform for hospital transplant coordinators, vetted transportation vendors, and pilots, synchronizing communication and using a matching algorithm to determine the most efficient vessel for each organ. Within a year of launch, it helped fly 65 organs across the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic.

To continue reading, click here.