When Gov. Brian Kemp announced Sunday that 34 Georgians and other neighboring passengers stranded on a ship off the coast of California over the coronavirus would be "securely transferred" under continuing quarantine to Dobbins Air Reserve Base in Marietta, he didn't say how.

The answer to that is 25 miles north of Marietta in Cartersville at the headquarters of the specialty charter flight company Phoenix Air Group. On Monday evening, general counsel and pilot Randall H. "Randy" Davis stepped off a plane at the airfield the company manages, walked across Highway 61 to the corporate office and made a "layover" at his desk to put the finishing touches on subcontracts he's been negotiating for Boeing 747s to fly the Grand Princess cruise ship passengers back to Georgia.

Phoenix Air has made unusual flights routine. The company has flown Saudi Arabian royalty to hospitals around the world for treatment, and taken dolphins to an aquarium and monkeys to a zoo. The company's pickups and refueling landings circle the globe, with meticulous preparations behind each one.

For the cruise ship passengers, Phoenix is working under a longstanding contract with the U.S. State Department using techniques the company has developed over years and made famous during the Ebola crisis. The contract commits Phoenix to being on call for such missions, ready to leave Cartersville on 12-hour notice, Davis said.

Ebola patients were typically picked up in Africa and returned to U.S. hospitals within 48 hours. The tab for the flights averaged $225,000. Davis said the state department secured reimbursement from the aid organizations that sent the Americans to Africa—or from foreign governments when appropriate.

The Ebola patients in 2014 were flown one at a time in single-person isolation chambers inside the company's fleet of modified Gulfstream III business jets. Phoenix used the same approach in 2017 for American college student Otto Warmbier after he was released comatose from a North Korean prison and taken to a Cincinnati hospital.

But the coronavirus is affecting more people and demanding bigger airplanes.

"The coronavirus is very contagious, but nowhere near as deadly as the Ebola situation," Davis said. "We had to move single infected infected people with Ebola. We have not had to move single infected corona people."

So Phoenix developed a larger bio containment unit that will fit inside a modified 747. But the company needed 747s. Fast. Hence the subcontracts on the GC's desk. Phoenix is subcontracting with other private companies for planes and pilots to use the proven procedures for expanded capacity. They're trucking the bigger medical isolation units 55 miles south to Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport.

The unit looks like something that could attach to the back of a tractor-trailer rig, but it slides in through the open nose of the aircraft, just over the cockpit, Davis said. The company has already used the system to move more than 1,000 Americans and 100 Canadians home from Wuhan, China, the epicenter of the coronavirus.

And what about the pilots?

"In a 747, the pilot cabin has its own airflow. That's been OK," Davis said. "In our Gulfstreams, we don't have the single pilot cabin. But we used the isolation chamber."

The need for subcontracts has given the GC "a lot more details to work out," Davis said. "On government contracts, there's not that much for a lawyer like me to do because the government [says], 'Take it or leave it.'"

Another important subcontract is with a company that cleans the planes after the trip. Davis said Phoenix uses the same provider with the coronavirus missions as with Ebola and other deadly diseases that have been carried inside the cabins.

"That airplane is one clean airplane when they get done," said Davis, who has heard people raise concerns about flying on the same aircraft afterward. "We tell them, after the decontamination, you have never been on such a clean plane in your life."