'I invented the "bubble" used to transport Ebola patients by plane'

I remember when I saw the aeroplane landing on television, and they were saying "first Ebola patient lands in the US". And I'm like, that's the aeroplane! That's it, right there! I hadn't tracked Ebola or anything since working on the system, but it was a big deal when they flew that first one back. When we worked on the plane, we hadn't even thought of Ebola. If anything, tuberculosis was the idea behind it, or some airborne pathogen. But if you develop something for an airborne pathogen, it works for other things. Ebola is a "touch" pathogen. But it works for that too.

I have a degree in aerospace engineering and, when I left the Air Force, I started my own small business in South Carolina.

A while back I did some work with a company called Phoenix Air, who supply a lot of aircraft to government agencies. The Center for Disease Control had come to them and asked them to develop what they call an airborne biocontainment system. So Phoenix Air called me and said: "How do you put a biocontainment system in a small aeroplane that's fast?"

The CDC got into trouble maybe 10 years ago. There was an American doctor in Africa who had gotten tuberculosis. And under our law, if a US citizen gets ill in a foreign country, the government must get him home. But they couldn't. So that's where the idea came from: we need to have an aeroplane we can send anywhere in the world to get US citizens.

They had developed what they called the exoskeleton. That's basically the tent poles, for lack of a better term. Once you transport this person, the pathogen is inside the tent. But how do you put that on an aeroplane? That's where I come in.

I grew up in a small town in North Carolina, called Eden. It was very small, a textile town. I had attended the Air Force Academy, because my father said: "We're poor. Either you get a scholarship, or you're on your own." And when I graduated, I was in the Air Force for 12 years. So I know how to fly but I'm also a fix-it person. It's a knack. Other people had tried to solve this one and not gotten anywhere. I don't think they understood the problem.

The key is: I have the tent but we still have to get air in, we still have to get air out, so the patient can breathe. But I can't take the risk of having the pathogen get out and infect the crew. So I designed an in-flow to bring air in, and an out-flow housing to take air out, to keep the pathogen inside.

We did the work in Georgia. We would go to the aeroplane, we would take measurements, we would get ideas, we'd go back, we'd work on the computer, design things. We had to go back and forth, trying things out, testing them, testing them again. You do smoke tests. You do a rapid decompression. You do all of those other things that an aeroplane could possibly do, short of a crash.

The plane was a Gulfstream III. There are companies that put people in a bubble on a big jet, but the problem you have is who can afford to have a large aeroplane? So that is the key: getting a fast aeroplane - and the Gulfstream is one of the fastest - that you can afford to operate.

They've used it for every person they've brought back to the US [with Ebola]. There was one lady they interviewed after she recovered, and she said, those were the darkest hours, on that aeroplane. Because you don't know. You're just on an aeroplane. You don't know what the results are going to be.

Photograph: Bryan Meltz

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