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

Mar. 15, 2025

Stock image of small plane in Alaska.Photo:Jacob Kupferman/Getty Stock Image

Jacob Kupferman/Getty Stock Image

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 affiliateKTUUon 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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Stock image of frozen turkeys in a market freezer.gerenme/Getty Stock Image

gerenme/Getty Stock Image

“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.”

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

source: people.com