Alaskan Woman Drops Thanksgiving Turkeys from Plane in an Effort to Feed Neighbors Who Live ‘Off the Grid’

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

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

Residents living in Skwentna and West Susitna Valley, Alaska, were delivered their Thanksgiving dinner in a very unusual way. It’s a common belief that turkeys can’t fly, but it seems they do — at least in Alaska.

For the last three years, local pilot Esther Sanderlin has been dropping what the local news refers to as “turkey bombs” near her fellow Alaskan neighbors who live off the road system. After hearing one of her newest neighbors talk about how squirrel meat would be their protein of choice for Thanksgiving dinner a new personal mission was ignited.

“I was visiting our newest neighbor and they were talking about splitting a squirrel three ways for dinner, and how that didn’t really go very far,” Sanderlin told Alaska's NBC affiliate KTUU on Monday, Nov. 25. “And I just had a thought at that moment, ‘You know what, I’m going to airdrop them a turkey for Thanksgiving,' because I recently rebuilt my first airplane with my dad and so I can do that really easily."

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Traversing the frozen terrains, especially without a nearby road system, can make it tough for locals who are seeking a hot meal for the holidays, but Sanderlin’s airborne delivery system gives her an advantage.

“During freeze up, you can’t really get around so you can’t travel out there,” she said. “But you can fly as long as you don’t land.”

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

“We had a friend, a neighbor who would air-drop turkeys to my family and to other families in the neighborhood,” she recalled. “That was just such a huge impact on my life and others in the community.”

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This year she’s dropping about 30 to 40 turkeys to ensure that her neighbors have a nice, hot meal to gobble up on Thanksgiving, but her hopes are to do even more in the future and turn her personal mission into a nonprofit so she can reach more people across Alaska.

“My vision with this is to reach farther parts of Alaska,” she said. “Because there are so many families that live off the grid.”