BUSINESS AVIATION: AN EMERGENCY ROOM IN THE SKY
Business airplanes are designed for pouncing on great opportunities, while the competition is still on the phone trying to get an airline reservation.
“We’re business airplanes too” said Mark Jones, president of Air Ambulance Worldwide, based in Palm Harbor, Florida. “It’s just that most people never see us, so they don’t know we exist. We don’t save business deals at 41,000 feet, we save lives at 41,000 feet.”
Air Ambulance Worldwide is one of about 75 U.S. providers of air medical transport in the U.S. using business aircraft permanently equipped as mobile emergency rooms, to transport men, women and children – some critically ill – to hospitals or other care facilities. Often, it’s a last minute medical emergency.
“I got a call from a man and his pregnant wife, vacationing in Jamaica” said Dana Payne, an Air Ambulance Worldwide flight coordinator. “Her water broke about two months premature, but the hospital in Jamaica had only two Isolettes™, and both were taken.”
“And he told me, ‘I don’t want her to have the baby here. Can you get her out of here?'”
That night, they boarded the air medical flight coordinated by Dana and arrived at a hospital near their home before the baby was born. “She’d miscarried twice before, so this was their miracle baby” said Dana. “They still send me pictures of her as she grows.”
Air ambulance is a growth industry. The demographic bulge of baby boomers reaching retirement and a Medicare program that encourages smaller hospitals to send seriously-injured patients to well-equipped trauma centers are two reasons. In addition, the number of emergency departments nationwide has fallen by nearly 20 percent since 1992.
“On the outside, we look like any other business airplane” says Mark Jones. “But we’re also an emergency room in the sky. It’s too bad more people don’t know that.”
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