Hurricane Melissa was the strongest to ever make landfall with Jamaica and went on to cause widespread devastation across both Jamaica and Cuba.
Emergency Response: Responding to Hurricane Melissa 2025 in the Caribbean
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Our Emergency Response and Humanitarian team was called into action within days and our first charter flight landed for in Kingston Airport only 4 days after landfall. Our first charter was from Barbados carrying Canadian funded aid. Later the same day, two additional charters landed from Canada into Kingston, carrying items for a field hospital deployment. Later that same weekend, a 737F charter was arranged from Panama stocks carrying shelter & hygiene kits.
In total, our team provided 7 charter flights for our NGO partners to Jamaica and then an additional 4 charter flights in early 2026 for the US-government announced response to Cuba.
In addition to the charter flights, we shipped over 20 commercial shipments air and ocean to Jamaica, including a WHO EMT field hospital mobilisation from Spain.
Stuart Smith, Director Humanitarian said “This was a particularly condensed response since Melissa was the only largescale natural disaster in 2025, in what was otherwise a quiet Atlantic Hurricane season. We had to stand up very quickly across all modes of transport. The early days of the response were rather frantic since Kingston airport was very overwhelmed with cargo arrivals”
