Harold Katinszky seethes with anger whenever he...

Harold Katinszky seethes with anger whenever he sees empty seats on a commercial airplane.

To the Lawndale private pilot and flight instructor, each empty seat represents a lost opportunity to help financially strapped cancer patients who can’t afford expensive plane fares for trips to far-away hospitals.

The concept of giving free flights to people in medical and financial need has fallen on deaf ears at most airlines. In 1984, however, a group of private pilots who already were flying supplies and organs in medical emergencies opened their doors to patients.

About 850 “missions of mercy” are organized nationwide every year by AirLifeLine, a nonprofit charitable organization based in Sacramento with a network of 345 private pilots.

Katinszky, 31, who flies out of the Hawthorne Airport, joined the AirLifeLine network in 1987. But earlier this year the pilot decided he had to give it up. Each flight, although tax deductible, was costing him about $400 in fuel, maintenance fees and time he could have spent teaching flying. Until he paid off some of his bills, Katinszky thought, he couldn’t afford to be so magnanimous.

Then in April he received a call from AirLifeLine. A 10-year-old girl with a rare and deadly form of leukemia needed transportation from Palo Alto to UCLA Medical Center, where she was to undergo a bone marrow transplant.

He accepted the mission thinking, “This is so dumb, Harold. You can’t afford this.”

But as soon as he met Ava Rocha, a slender child with light brown hair and a wide smile, his money problems seemed trivial. “I thought, I would have spent my last dime to help this little girl,” he said.

Ava spent nearly two months at UCLA undergoing radiation treatment for her blood disorder before being transferred earlier this month to Children’s Hospital at Stanford. A week ago, when doctors were sure that her immune system would not reject the bone marrow transplant she had received, they released her from the hospital.

Although she lives in Modesto, she and her mother will remain in Palo Alto for the next two months so doctors at the Stanford hospital can monitor her progress.

“It meant a lot to me that he would donate his time, his gas, his plane, everything,” Ava’s mother, Phyllis Rocha, said. “I really don’t know how we would have gotten there without him.”

As for Katinszky, he vowed to continue flying for AirLifeLine, no matter the personal expense, and to do all he can to urge other pilots and commercial airlines to participate in the program.

“There are people out there that need my help, and it’s the least I can do,” he said. “If someone owns an airplane, he owes it to himself to help these people. We’re not the heroes. The heroes are the children putting up a fight for their lives.”