Truckers Rescue Local Hurricane Aid Effort : Relief: Workers at a Palmdale plant will use donated vehicles to transport items to Miami after Pentagon refuses to give them space on a military cargo plane.

How many planes does the Air Force have? Not enough, apparently.

Personnel at Plant 42, an Air Force assembly and flight test facility in Palmdale, have helped gather clothes, food and other supplies for Miami-area victims of Hurricane Andrew.

But there is a wrinkle. The Pentagon has told local Air Force officials who are coordinating transportation that they cannot use a military transport plane to deliver the goods.

So what do airlift organizers plan to do with half a warehouse of supplies desperately needed by hurricane victims on the other side of the continent?

They plan to drive them there.

“It irks me that we can send planes overseas to help people,” volunteer Bill Jarome said Friday as he unloaded donations arriving at Plant 42. “But we can’t send a plane to help our own.”

So far, the airlift effort--organized by local Federal Aviation Administration officials--has drummed up more than 50 tons of food and relief supplies. But they have not been able to use even one of the dozens of the capacious C-130, C-141 and C-5 Air Force cargo planes that trundle into the facility each day from March, Norton and Travis Air Force bases.

Thanks to the efforts of Draker Air Support trucking company President Darryl Godwin, the supplies will get to Miami.

Instead of being stockpiled in a military warehouse, the supplies will be delivered to the doorsteps of the people who need them, including the families of 160 FAA employees and others made homeless by the hurricane.

On Tuesday, the supplies will be packed into three 18-wheelers lined up by Godwin. After two coffee-fueled days and nights of nonstop driving, the truckers are scheduled to arrive at Tamiami Airport, where they will be met by FAA officials.

“And if there’s another load of supplies the following week, he’ll take them too,” Plant 42 spokeswoman Lorraine Sadler said of Godwin. “What an unusual man.”

Godwin says he is not so special. He just wants to help out a well-intentioned effort that was foundering.

The relief effort started a week ago, when employees in the Los Angeles Air Route Traffic Control Center in Palmdale received a fax from Miami-based FAA officials and family members who desperately needed help.

After getting approval from her boss, Anthia Huff, 33, a controller trainee who has worked for the FAA for a little more than a year, started calling radio and television stations and school districts for help.

Supplies and foodstuffs began rolling in by the carload--baby strollers, diapers, canned goods and mountains of clothing. On Friday, the inmates of the federal prison camp at Boron sent sunscreen, bug repellent, generators and other supplies.

On Wednesday, Huff called the “Mark and Brian Show” on radio station KLOS and was put on the air. She described the relief effort “and it went off like an atom bomb,” said her supervisor, Michael Johnston.

While the donated items were stored in a hangar, Sadler spent several frustrating days trying to secure a cargo plane to bring the supplies east.

“I went all the way to the Pentagon, after starting with the state and asking for the National Guard,” Sadler said.

All she wanted, she told Pentagon officials, was space on one cargo plane. After many phone calls, including one to a state senator, Sadler got a call from a colonel at the Pentagon, who delivered the bad news.

“The bottom line,” Sadler said, “was the planes were not available.”

It is a very complicated process to secure the services of a military transport plane, even if you work at an Air Force facility, said Air Force spokesman Lt. Col. Mike Gannon.

“There are only so many airplanes,” Gannon said. “Obviously, you can’t fly it all. You just can’t go around the U.S. picking stuff up--it’s not very practical and it’s not economical.”

On Friday, after word went out that the Air Force had the donated goods but no plane to transport them, Sadler received a call from another Pentagon spokesman who told her how she could go through the Federal Emergency Management Agency to get a plane.

But Sadler already had tried that route and was told there would be a wait of at least several days to fly the donated goods--and another delay at the other end before it would be distributed.

Besides, Godwin said, the supplies cannot wait. And his truckers can probably get the goods there faster.

“We can make it in 60 hours--and that’s legal driving,” he said. “We’re an airline that never leaves the ground.”