TAMPA — Two days after Christmas, Mike Honeycutt was headed to his Westshore offices when he got the call: An American tourist had a heart attack in Jamaica and needed to get home.

So Honeycutt, CEO of the air ambulance and medical evacuation company Jet ICU and a pilot himself, flew with his medical team to bring the man back — all in all, a fairly typical Tuesday.

Honeycutt, 53, is from small town North Carolina where planes dusted crops and military jets from the nearby base flew overhead. He’s married to Becky, lives in Palm Harbor, just became a grandpa and, oh yeah, has circled the globe several times. He prefers a pilot’s seat to an office chair.

The family business he runs with his father, Bill, is 7 planes and 10 pilots with dozens of medical, transportation, communications and administrative employees. Down the hall at the office, his dad runs the side of the company that handles travelers insurance for missionaries.

When you have seen most of the Seven Wonders, there are plenty of stories — like the time at the height of the pandemic when an island nation was reluctant to let a cruise ship passenger with COVID disembark there in order to board a Jet ICU plane back to the U.S. “We ended up having to trade a ventilator,” Honeycutt said, to make it happen.

A conversation with Mike Honeycutt. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

How early did you know you wanted to fly?

In high school, my senior year. I was trying to decide what to do. My dad’s best friend grew up as a crop duster and (became an airline) pilot. He told me about his job, worked 15 days a month, traveled all over the world.

Then I went out and took my first intro flight, and I was hooked. I wanted to see the world.

How did the Jet ICU business evolve?

I flew freight for a while. That led me into flying three of the NASCAR teams around.

I started flying for a small air ambulance ... They would go anywhere in the world at a moment’s notice. I loved it, being from a small town. In six months, I’d been in four, maybe five continents. You get to see some stuff. But it’s not a vacation by any means.

I’ve seen the Great Wall from the air. That’s pretty nice.

I got hired with a small airline, Midway, and missed what I (had been) doing. A lot of people like the schedule, and for me, coming from getting a call, pack your bags, you’re going to Berlin, that was exciting. I missed it.

(After 911, he took early furlough and went back to the air ambulance company. After it folded, he decided in 2003 to start his own.)

There’s something to be said for being young and ambitious. I have a friend in the insurance business who says “It’s not impossible, it just takes longer.”

Two days after Christmas, you were on the way to Jamaica and back. Is that last-minute scramble pretty typical?

That’s what we specialize in, anywhere in the world, what we call long-haul medical transport. Ninety percent of our trips are urgent like that. We don’t have a lot of planning involved. It is the nature of the business.

Medical (team members) will tell me: Time is tissue.

Did the patient in Jamaica make it?

He did. They were optimistic he would make a good recovery.

What’s the bulk of the business — sick or injured passengers on cruise ships? Cases like the Florida boy with the rare brain-eating amoeba you flew to Chicago for care? Tourists in foreign lands?

We do a lot of work with Canadians (who fly home to universal health care.) We do a lot with cruise lines ... all kinds of medical emergencies. We do a lot of work with Johns Hopkins (All Children’s Hospital) with transporting preemies. We do a lot of kids and everything in between.

On a trip out of Europe, we got a 94-year-old gentleman. One of my nurses asked him, “Well, you think you’re going to stop traveling now?” He said, “What, am I going to sit on my porch and wait to die?”

It was eye-opening, life-changing, to me. He’s right.

Do you follow the patients after your part is over?

We do. We get a lot of feedback (cards, notes, and in a recent case, a photo of a boy on the mend in a hospital bed after an incident while snorkeling with his family in Turks and Caicos.) Our nurses develop a relationship with the patients and the traveling companions.

(After Honeycutt’s father heard about twin babies born prematurely in Utah that needed to get home to St. Petersburg, Jet ICU flew them.) Dad’s been to two birthday parties (since). We’ve stayed close with them.

This is a very rewarding business.

News stories have noted cases in which Jet ICU transport was provided for free — for instance, when the family of a University of South Florida student injured in a car crash while visiting Cuba in 2015 could not afford to fly her home. (More recently the company provided discounted transport for a 12-year-old girl who was the only survivor when her family was in a head-on wreck while vacationing in Mexico in June.)

You know, we’re blessed. When we feel like we need to jump in, we do. Tampa’s my small town now. You help your neighbors.

Talk about a case that sticks with you.

There’s so many.

There was a girl I flew in ‘98. She was 18, terminally ill. She had bone marrow cancer. They brought her from Oslo for a new treatment they were trying. It didn’t work for her, so we were taking her home. (On that flight they had to divert, land, and wheel her through customs.) She was in a lot of pain.

So we rolled her back out. I said “I’m so sorry we had to stop.” She said “No — thank you. You’re taking me home so I can die with my family.”

How many miles do you think you’ve logged?

I’ve flown eastbound around the world three times. Westbound twice. From a pilot’s standpoint, not many people do that. I’ve been blessed.

So, more miles than I can remember.

It’s a great day when you see the sun rise and set on the same day at 41,000 feet.

Is flying still fun?

It is. They say if you do something you enjoy, you never work a day in your life.