Servicing JFK Airliners for Decades, Now There’s Ebola

The airport job was a good job. You could put food on the table, buy boots for the kids and have enough left for an overnight or two in Atlantic City. All that changed in time, and now Victor Nunez, with 33 years on the job, was headed to work in the early hours at John F. Kennedy International Airport with a new reason to lament the way things are: Ebola. The deadly virus had been the talk for weeks around Terminal 4, where the West African flights come in. People were nervous.

Nunez, 57, is a truck driver at JFK. The slender Dominican and proud American citizen delivers food and drink to four or five jetliners during a typical shift in one of those small boxy vehicles that rises on hydraulic lifts to the cabin doors. Showing up before dawn on Oct. 16, he was being told, and not for the first time, that he would have to service an aircraft arriving from Nigeria. There are no direct flights to the U.S. from countries where the Ebola outbreak has claimed thousands of lives -- Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea -- and so Nigeria with its carrier Arik Air becomes one option.