Huntington aviation company and others helping Hurricane Helene victims

HUNTINGTON, Ind. (WPTA) - Scott Nicola is about to embark on a journey - to help people in areas of the country devastated by Hurricane Helene.

Nicola owns Patriot Aviation in Huntington. He saw pilots across the country planning to help the flood victims and wanted to help too. He shared a post on Facebook and was overwhelmed by the response from the community.

Nicola has received hundreds of donations from people across the community.

Nicola says, "There's not very many opportunities that we get to use our airplanes and resources locally to help out flood victims and so we just jumped on the opportunity when we saw the need."

As of Monday night, they've been able to put four planes in the air.

"I think there's still a lot of life and death decisions being made and a lot of life-saving efforts that are being conducted and this is just a small part in making sure that once they're off the mountain that we can give them some supplies," says Shelley Septer.

Septer is the founder of Backpacks for Hope. When she saw Nicola's Facebook post about the donations, she knew they had the resources to help.

Septer says, "We love moments like today where we can pay it forward no matter if it's someone in our own community or if it's someone in another state, what matters is that we all can rally around them, it takes a village to take care of each other."

Nicola is happy to have so much help from the community. He says, "that's you know, a good feeling that we've got so many people that want to help out and donate their time and resources when people are in need. Our community is great, we've had a great outreach so far, a lot of other people asking how to help and so we're trying to coordinate efforts so we can."

They are accepting more donations at the airport from 7-11 a.m. on Tuesday, October 1.