Multiple reasons. There are procedures that air med can do that some ground crews can’t. There are drugs / products that air med can carry that some ground crew don’t. There is a gross under staffing in a lot of EMS stations these days. You have contracts involved where a ground ambulance cannot go out of county or only X number of miles.Personal note: Why a 51 nm flight, with the delays at both ends, when driving is ~1:30?All 4 on board killed in medical plane crash in New Mexico: Officials
All four people on board a small medical plane were killed when the flight crashed near Ruidoso, New Mexico.abcnews.com
Personal note: Why a 51 nm flight, with the delays at both ends, when driving is ~1:30?All 4 on board killed in medical plane crash in New Mexico: Officials
All four people on board a small medical plane were killed when the flight crashed near Ruidoso, New Mexico.
Depends. Sometimes forever.
Not to derail the thread early, but…
Not long, even in a Skyhawk. That is, actual flying time. But we all know that's not all of the actual time. Not even close.
But in this instance they hadn't picked up the patient. The only members that perished were air crew members. So we don't know final destinationNot to derail the thread early, but…
Even the reasons to call an ambulance have changed. 50 years ago when my dad was a volunteer fireman/ambulance driver, you took an ambulance to get to the hospital faster. “Drive faster, Wayne, he’s getting worse!” Today the ambulance has equipment to sustain life, or even resolve the problem without even going to the hospital. My mom had an issue that boiled down to, “we can shock your heart and fix it,” and she stayed home.
Exactly, destination or level of care required. Trying to figure out how they overshot final for ILS and kept descending.
No buck no Buck Rogers. In my wife's setting (hospitalist vampire shift) the differentials are significant between day, evening,and overnight shifts, especially overnight+weekend. It's like 22K pre-tax for the same job and experience, which at the sub 6 figure pay rates, it represents a large (25%+) bump.
Not that complicated. Same as always. WOCL is trash, people dismiss the degree to which people can reliably operate single pilot at these hours while attempting to maintain a diurnal domestic life the rest of the month with the people in your life, family or not. Add low yearly block on the instrument cross-check proficiency front, and it's all a game of dice. Nothing that can be proven in court of course, so you'll just have to imagine what it's like, if you've never had a job where you rely on this swip-swap day week/night week circadian wrecking ball to put food on the table.
I've never understood how people can operate like this regularly. Sister's boyfriend is C90 atc and he seemingly never keeps the same schedule.
Yeah my medcrew was just talking about the pay differences for nights today. More pay and if it’s an open overtime shift, $500-750 bonus on top of that. It’s cut throat these days. Pilots / medcrews jumping ship left and right to go to any program paying more than ours. The whole industry is short staffed.
If that gets confirmed, I hope they go hard after the morons that play GPS jamming games.
That would be the military playing the games.
I didn't notice the 1:30 mentioned in the article (thought I only scanned it quickly). But is that one way that you looked up on Google Maps or did they state it? It may have been 3hrs if a properly equipped ambulance had to driver out there and back. A lot of small rural teams may not have the equipment necessary.
And you can’t fly without GPS?
I can fly, but lost weather radar, TAWS, ADSB traffic…. These modern aircraft are very GPS integrated.
Yes, if that ends up being the cause, heads should roll.
You missed the "If that gets confirmed" part.
Two ways it can go dead:
For the most part you only have a compass, VORs, and may not even have DME since GPS serves as DME in most modern aircraft. So all approaches needing DME are no longer available, all GPS approaches are no longer available so you’re kind of stuck with VOR or ILS approaches that have radar available. These are few and far between in the mountains. Many airports in mountain areas out west are non-radar due to terrain. Can be very lonely. Very dark, limited nav options. Sounds like they were inbound. No TAWS, no NAV. So you climb and hope you don’t climb into a mountain. Without TAWS not gonna hear terrain pull up terrain pull up.
Seems like pretty poor design if a single-point failure can degrade things that far.
We did keep a DME in our Citation.
Like MCAS with a single AoA sensor. Some sort of inertial guidance buffer should be affordable in today's world, self-adjusting when GPS signal is true.
That still probably wouldn’t allow any type of approach.
True. I’ve done it myself.
Just to keep us out of the cumulogranite would be fine.
Situational awareness could do that.
It's an interesting decision point. I know of more than one individual making their aircraft GPS-only during avionics upgrades to save money by not needing to buy a nav radio. Their logic is that GPS is bulletproof and they don't plan to fly any ILS approaches. Personally, I kept both nav radios in mine since it's additional capability at (IMO) minimal extra expense.
Based on ... a bad GPS signal?
I can answer that one. In many rural areas they only have one ambulance. They're not willing to give it up for 4-5 hours (your 1:30 plus transfer and turn around).Personal note: Why a 51 nm flight, with the delays at both ends, when driving is ~1:30?All 4 on board killed in medical plane crash in New Mexico: Officials
All four people on board a small medical plane were killed when the flight crashed near Ruidoso, New Mexico.
A compass, a clock, and a little preflight planning.
Ah, just like the old days...
