How Flights for Freedom is flying trafficked children to safety

In 2023, Ken Lux found himself in an FBI briefing on child trafficking. The CEO of Luxe Aviation was there as the past commander of the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office’s Air Squadron, a volunteer cadre of 50 general aviation pilots supporting police missions and community service. Lux recalls the FBI agent relaying the story of a since-jailed airline pilot who used his credentials to traffic children to clients in the Philippines with chilling negotiations.

“I have a girl that’s 12 years old for your client,’” the pilot said.

The client’s response: “No, we think we need an 8-year-old.”

The group was horrified. “I have two daughters,” Lux says. “We said, ‘Wait a minute, really? Where are these people?’ Until that time, I thought it only happened overseas. And they said, ‘No, it happens in every community in the United States.’”

The agent showed them photos of girls crammed into squalid rooms, branded with clipped ears, tattoos, and burns, with life expectations averaging just seven years in such conditions.

“A lot of times, it’s just kids that get mixed up with the wrong people, or somehow get tricked into it. And then they don’t know how to get out,” Lux says.

Lux and his colleagues would learn the extent of the crisis—a $150 billion global criminal enterprise whose size trails only that of illegal drugs. Human trafficking involves more than 27 million victims worldwide—who are forced into marriages, slave labor, military service, organ sales, and sexual exploitation. That includes some 200,000 victims domestically, prompting January to be designated as National Human Trafficking Prevention Month.

Flying rescue missions

The briefing so rattled the squadron pilots that they began volunteering for police rescue missions, focusing on victims of sex trafficking. Their first trip shuttled a trafficked teen in Sacramento back home to Oregon. Then came more requests from surrounding counties and district attorneys needing to ferry the rare survivor brave enough to testify against her captor to court.

“It’s really hard to pin down and prosecute these guys because they use burner phones and hide behind technology,” Lux says. “It’s not like the drug business, where they find you with so much cocaine in your car.”

As demand grew, Lux realized that they needed a more formalized organization. In April 2024, he founded Flights to Freedom (F2F), a nonprofit that matches 200 volunteer pilots nationwide with law enforcement, Child Protective Services, aftercare advocacy centers, and medical staff. “We could probably use 200 [pilots] just in California because the problem is so pervasive,” he says.

F2F board adviser Kevin LaRosa, the aerial coordinator for films such as Top Gun: Maverick and F1, considers the organization a lifeline to the most vulnerable. “Aviation isn’t just about speed and connectivity—it’s about human impact,” he says. “When law enforcement rescues a child from exploitation, swift and secure transport can literally be the first step toward healing and safety.”

F2F has organized just over two dozen flights to transport survivors ages 12 to 24 across 11 states. But it can accept only half of its monthly requests due to time constraints or a lack of planes. Because law enforcement can’t reserve rescuers, F2F has only a 24- to 48-hour window to organize flights.

“If I can’t find a pilot available, we have to turn [down requests],” Lux says. “It’s heartbreaking.”

The nonprofit operates on a $60,000 budget, which covers insurance and an office at McClellan Airport in Sacramento. It is funded by individual donations and an annual fundraiser at the Aerospace Museum of California, where Lux was a past president. Except for a few regional jets, most of its pilots fly smaller airplanes that hold four to six people. (Lux’s ride is a Beechcraft 58 Baron, a six-seater twin-engine plane.) On rare occasions, F2F has chartered flights when it hasn’t found a pilot. “The problem is, we don’t have a lot of money,” he adds.

Lux’s focus for this year is recruiting more pilots (who can apply here), partnering with larger charter companies, and increasing awareness of F2F and similar services like Freedom Aviation Network and Wings of the Way. He’s already mapped out a $750,000 to $1 million plan to eventually expand F2F’s operations. “We’ve proven it works; now it’s time to push it to the next level,” he says.

The first steps in healing

Every F2F flight includes a chaperone—usually a deputy sheriff, a Child Protective Services advocate, or a licensed therapist—who accompanies the survivors and evaluates both their state of mind and ability to fly by means of a customized psychiatric and medical questionnaire. The chaperone also serves as a buffer between the pilots, who are often male, and the very traumatized survivors.

“They’re often on drugs. They’ve been brainwashed. They’ve been abused up to 20 times per day,” Lux says. “We don’t want someone to have a really bad experience on an airplane with a strange pilot and a strange plane going to different places. We follow a sterile cockpit policy—typically, the pilot doesn’t know who the deputies or survivors are. It’s all confidential. It’s all safe.”

Victims, sometimes rescued in the middle of the night or in sting operations, are given backpacks with a blanket, a change of clothes, hygiene products, and a blue teddy bear. They’re walked down a red carpet to the plane entrance and treated to a private jet experience—often their first time on an airplane.

“I feel like we really are one of the first steps in healing,” Lux says. “We hear back from some of the survivors through the agencies, and they’re just, like, ‘We are so grateful to Flights to Freedom, because it was the first time in my life anyone ever paid attention to me.’”