GENERAL AVIATION TO THE RESCUE Continued from page 21 “Our first government contract started 15 years ago for the U.S. Air Force Air Mobility Command (AMC) at a time when a lot of U.S. service people were being injured in con- flicts overseas,” Thompson said. “They would be hurt on the battlefield or in a training accident somewhere and would be taken to Landstuhl Hospital in Frankfurt, Germany for triage.” “If the injuries or sickness or whatever could be handled in that facility, then they would go back to their unit,” he continued. “If they needed to come back to the U.S. they would come back here on big military transport planes and go into Andrews Air Force Base, because the military oper- ates a number of hospitals and rehab facilities throughout Virginia, Maryland and Washington, D.C. But some patients needed specialty treatment that was handled at hospitals spread around the country. So, our contract, from the begin- ning, has been to have a Lear jet waiting at Andrews Air Force base and when the big C-17 transport plane lands, one of our specialty airplanes will go out and the patient will get a wing-to-wing transfer right on the ramp. Then we take off with a full medical staff. We’re talking spinal injuries, head trauma—anything where there’s a very specialized hospital they’re going to. We’ve been doing that regularly for 15 years and continue to do probably three flights a week on average.” Phoenix Air has been in the medical transport business for more than 25 years. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the group began making its air ambulance service a full- time business rather than a sideline, installing permanent medical interiors in the dedicated Lear and Gulfstream jets in its fleet and hiring a team of physicians, nurses and pilots specializing in medevac missions. “We don’t do much medical transport domestically in the U.S. other than for our U.S. government contracts, because there are a lot of companies competing in that space,” Thompson said. “We’ve basically found a niche as an inter- national medical transport operator. Along the way, we’ve increased the sophistication of our Air Ambulance division. Today, we have two full-time physicians, 12 additional physi- cians on call and about 35 flight nurses and flight paramed- ics. We have three medevac aircraft—Gulfstream G-III jets—positioned around the world and under contract to the U.S. Department of State, which can be dispatched in 12 hours or less. One is based here in Cartersville, one is based on the island of Malta, and the third is based in Nairobi, Kenya. All of the aircraft are Intensive Care Unit level care, and we have pilots, medical staff and maintenance personnel at all three bases. When we get a directive to do a mission, our contract requires us to be airborne within 12 hours max; and, generally, we’re airborne in less than six hours. We’ve become the fire department of the U.S. government, in that we can activate very quickly.” In addition to responding to natural disasters like the 2017 hurricanes and infectious disease outbreaks like the 2014 Ebola crisis, Phoenix Air has been making recent head- lines in some high-profile international news stories thanks to its increased government contracts, from the transport of brain-damaged American college student Otto Warmbier out of North Korea in June 2017 to the airlift of 11 patients out of war-torn South Sudan in 2013 following an attempted coup d’état. “It was an extremely tense, dicey situation,” Thompson said of the South Sudan mission. “We were asked to go into the capital, Juba, and take out these 11 U.S. citizens who had just been savaged. Some of the women had been raped mul- tiple times, one of the men had been shot in the stomach, and they all had assorted broken bones and other injuries. We landed and were able to get these people, take them out of there, and get them to a hospital in Nairobi, Kenya.” As difficult as such missions can be, Thompson says his company takes great pride in being prepared to answer the toughest calls. “What Phoenix Air has done over a number of years is develop a very good sense of how to operate under incredibly austere circumstances with little to no support, in missions that are fraught with logistical problems and issues that require out-of-the-box thinking and on-the-fly decision- making,” Thompson said. “It’s a great tribute to the team we have in place and the resources we’ve developed that we’re now called on fairly frequently when something terrible has happened.” Continued on page 24 Aviation Business Journal | 3rd Quarter 2018 23
