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Business is booming for the intrepid aviators of SkyLink, who fly relief missions into war and disaster zones. But while the money is great, the risks are enormous and the price of carelessness is death - by John Gray
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 An earthquake measuring 7.4 on the Richter scale has just turned what were once homes and offices in northwest Turkey into giant tombs. Thousands are dead and thousands more are dying, trapped in structures that look like trampled dollhouse. The US government has hired SkyLink, a Toronto aviation company, to fly a team of 72 specially trained search-and-rescue workers from Virginia to the scene-fast. Every minute's delay means another life lost. And now there's a problem. The plane secured for the job can't handle the team of six dogs that will sniff through the wreckage for signs of life.
"No, no! These are special dogs! They can't go in the cargo hold, they can't be in cages at all," SkyLink CEO Walter Arbib, a 58-year-old former Israeli travel agent, barks into a speakerphone to one of his managers in the company's Frankfurt office.
The clock is ticking. If the rescue team is not in Turkey within hours, it's unlikely it will find anyone alive. But as Arbib paces around SkyLink headquarters in Toronto's exclusive Rosedale neighborhood on this humid August night, he doesn't seem overly worried. This is a routine humanitarian mission in a business where failure to meet a deadline doesn't just mean you won't get paid, it means people will die. On this job, though, no one will shoot at SkyLink planes as they did in Sarajevo or Kosovo. Flight crews will not come under machine-gun and grenade attack as they did in Angola. And no one will be eaten by sharks as in Somalia, when a hapless employee took a badly timed swim to relax from the high-risk Work of flying humanitarian supplies and peace-keepers to the world's hot spots.
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