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For residents in rural parts of the country, finding medical care can be a challenge, and it often comes at a high price. But a program based in St. Cloud is helping put an end to this dilemma. A group of amateur pilots volunteer their time to fly patients to hospitals in larger cities. They call themselves Wings of Mercy and they do all their work for free.

TIM BRAKSTED WARMS UP THE ENGINE on his Pioneer Cherokee four-seater. He's run through this checklist countless times in his 15 years as a pilot, but since 1996, preparing for a flight has taken on new meaning. That was the year Braksted and a group of amateur pilots began flying "missions" for the group Wings of Mercy.

Braksted: Every pilot likes to fly, so any excuse to fly more is always a plus. I don't think anybody in the group had any idea that they were going to get so tied to it. And I don't think I've ever talked to any of the pilots who have flown in the group who haven't come away with something extremely close to them.

Braksted: We picked up an elderly lady and brought her back to St. Paul. She was over there at a family reunion, her cancer flared up, and she wasn't able to make a motor trip back home. Her one wish was that she wanted to come back to St. Paul and be home with her family in her last few days. She got that one dream that she wanted bad and couldn't have economically accomplished any other way.

Young: We'll cover Denver, Colorado, down as far south as Joplin, Missouri, then going east to Terre Haute, Indiana ... We've been to Cincinnati and up to Ann Arbor, Michigan.

With Christmas fast approaching, the only thing on Courtney's mind is how many of those presents under the tree are for her. She skips around the living room humming her favorite Christmas song. Her brief life hasn't always been this carefree. When she was two days old, she suffered the first in a series of liver failures. By age three, she was attracting national attention when she became the youngest person to have a liver and small bowel transplant. Courtney's mom, Michelle, says the first year after surgery, she and Courtney had to make trips once a week from their farm in Canby to the University of Minnesota Medical Center in the Twin Cities; trips she says she never could have made without the Wings of Mercy pilots.

Macht: Oh, it would have been driving to Minneapolis and St. Paul, which I cannot do. I am so scared of it and I don't know my way around. It's so good the way they have it set up where we fly into the airport, we call a cab, and the cab takes us to the hospital. And when we're done, the cab takes us back to the airport and the guys fly us back to Marshall. No other organization is going to do that for you.

Braksted: Most of us look back at it and say, even the missions that end in a patient passing away at some point, we know we've done something positive and that, had we not been there, they either would not have gotten treatment or been able to make it home in time.