[Peetwo]

Bailey's weekly waffle from the Oz -  

Unless you have a paid subscription to the Oz, most people would not be aware that former Hoody (ATSB - MH370)  protagonist Byron Bailey now writes a weekly feature article for the Friday's Aviation edition of the Oz. Mostly this appears to be a chance for BB to strut his fame and vast experience/ego as a former Sky God. Hence the reason I do not bother regurgitating his weekly waffle. However because this week BB's (waffle) is quite topical, to many AP/BRB/IOS members, I'll make an exception...  

Saviour flights hit the heights





BYRON BAILEY

General aviation has been suffering the death of a thousand cuts inflicted by the Civil Aviation Safety Authority over the past 30 years.

There is, however, one branch of GA that has healthy growth, and that is the aeromedical industry.

Angel Flights and the Royal Flying Doctor Service are well known to the public.

Not so well known are the flights of medical evacuations, medical retrievals and organ donor harvests.

Over the past 10 years since I retired from airline flying I have been involved in all three as well as private and corporate jet flying.

In the major resource centre of the Pilbara, centred on the city of Karratha, is a very busy airport, home to two medical jets equipped as airborne intensive care units. This, along with teams of pilots, doctors and paramedics, supplies 24/7 coverage for the thousands of FIFO (fly-in, fly-out) workers of the mining, oil and gas companies.

There are more than 30 rigs in the northwest shelf and medical recovery for an injured or sick worker is initially by helicopter to the Barrow Island industrial complex airport, then a transfer to a jet for the two-hour dash to Perth. Coverage is also supplied for the local area inhabitants if the case is beyond the capability of Karratha hospital.

I recently had a medical evacuation flight from Barrow Island to Perth for a worker who had a severe and sudden cardiac event.

On the flight to Perth the doctor advised me that the patient was critical so Perth air traffic control permitted us a straight-in, downwind runway landing to save time. The patient was whisked away in an ambulance for immediate and life-saving open-heart surgery.

Ideally placed at Gold Coast Airport is a Falcon 50 medical jet on standby for retrieval of Australian patients who are too incapacitated to return home on airlines.

This high-speed jet with a range of more than 5000km covers all of the South Pacific as well as southwest Asia and China. In addition to the on-board doctor and nurse, the team can call on the services of co-pilot Sandra Cabot, a doctor who spent eight months working in a hospital in north India, mainly delivering babies, and who happens to be the owner of the aircraft. She also has 200 Angel Flights to her credit over a long period of time in her Beechcraft Baron.

This is why it is important to have travel insurance that covers repatriation to Australia.

Young Australians doing adventurous activities that might cause injury and elderly cruise liner passengers who need to be offloaded for hospital admission in a foreign port are prime candidates.

However, most pick-ups are local inhabitants, with serious medical complications, from Noumea, Fiji, Samoa and so on.

Organ donor harvests are frequent and do not need a jet that is medically equipped.

There are more than 1400 people awaiting organ transplants in Australia. Because these transplants are done at specialist hospitals like the Royal Prince Alfred in Sydney, the logistics of the operation are complicated and need military-like precision.

When the tragedy of death occurs or a life support system is to be switched off, a major process kicks into gear.

Recipients previously identified according to priority and surgical teams that will do the actual operations are alerted and placed on standby.

The organ harvest teams of doctors and assistants are also activated so they can prepare their equipment. Police at the donor’s location and recipient’s base are used for priority transport of the organs and teams in both directions at both locations.

Pilots and staff involved in the aircraft operation are called out from standby.

This generally happens in the evening so that the organ harvest of heart, lungs, liver, kidneys and so forth, which takes about four hours, can be completed in order for the flight to land back in Sydney about dawn. The waiting police can then whisk the medical teams and their precious cargo to the waiting hospitals for what can be, for some patients, a life-saving event. The organs are usually transported in eskies with dry ice, but the heart can be transported in a machine that keeps it beating the whole time, from harvest to being actually transplanted.

The sadness of one tragic event can bring happiness and relief to many others. There are many patients waiting for donated organs, some of them for a considerable length of time.

The one thing that is clear is that there is an insufficient number of organ donors. People should be more actively encouraged to be organ donors, which is indicated on their drivers licence.

Vehicle crashes are a major source of donor material, but the ending of one life can mean the saving of several others.

Byron Bailey is a former RAAF fighter pilot and flew B777s as an airline captain.

Hmm...marginally more entertaining than the totally unbelievable weasel-worded confection in the Oz from the DAS Carmody Capers (see - http://www.auntypru.com/forum/thread-142...ml#pid9446 ) -   

However in terms of comments IMHO Wellsy nails it...  

Aeromedical is funded significantly by governments and major contracts - and angel flight is - while well intentioned - an issue which casa attempted to deal with but haven’t followed up on - having private pilots transport patients around - of which there have been two recent fatalities is a glaring issue within the industry which this article could have chosen to talk about ... imagine if proper GA, ie the mum and dad business (not the RFDS), with mortgages, got the angel flight work ... why don’t they? Because GA is business, paying wages, paying tax, paying airservices / landing fees... paying many of these costs that aeromedical doesn't pay ... and employing, training, maintaining fully qualified commercial pilots, safety management systems etc ... to keep the travelling public safe - which RAISES the costs of flying ... and no one wants to pay - so the solution is to less regulated private operations, less safe and wrap it up as a “charity”  ... this article
could have taken the opportunity to ask what is happening about why casa hasn’t acted to look at private operators without the safeguards of commerical operators are doing these flights ... but the article is yet another talkfest about the awesomeness of the author when he was in the left hand seat ... yawn

    
 MTF...P2