The NTSB will gather Tuesday to give a cause for the accident in August 2011 that killed four people


WASHINGTON — A medevac pilot was sending and receiving text messages before a crash that killed all four people on board, it emerged Monday.


Bloomberg.com reported that it's the first time such distractions have been implicated in a fatal commercial aviation accident.

The NTSB will gather Tuesday to give a cause for the accident in August 2011 that killed four people – patient Terry Tacoronte, Pilot James Freudenbert, Randy Bever, a flight nurse, and Chris Frakes, a paramedic – and to discuss the documented seven texts sent and received by the pilot prior to the crash, according to the article.

Freudenbert, 34, disclosed to a coworker before the crash that he hadn’t slept well the night before his flight and he failed to refuel the helicopter before flying to a hospital in Bethany, Missouri, according to NTSB records.

He recognized the mistake after landing at the hospital and spoke to a company dispatcher about where he could get more fuel and was headed to Midwest National Air Center Airport before the helicopter crashed, according to Bloomberg.

The Air Methods Corp. (AIRM) helicopter crashed in a field after running out of fuel. Electronic devices used by pilots during flight are prohibited by company rules, according to the reports. 

“This is a classic example of dividing attention in a way that compromises safety,” David Strayer, a psychology professor at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City who has studied how personal electronic devices cause distraction, told Bloomberg.

Full article: http://www.ems1.com/air-medical-transport/articles/1429050-Texting-while-flying-linked-to-fatal-medevac-crash/

By Maria Babbage
The Canadian Press

TORONTO - Ornge failed to do its job when it spent $6 million on medical interiors for its new helicopters that didn't allow paramedics to perform CPR and other life-saving procedures at all times, a former top executive testified Wednesday.

Tom Lepine, who was fired as Ornge's chief operating officer, said he only discovered the problem with the medical interiors of the AW-139 helicopters in late 2010, after the first chopper went into service.

Ornge paid $144 million for 12 helicopters from Italian firm AgustaWestland, whose dealings with Ornge have come under intense scrutiny. It also paid $6 million for the Swiss-manufactured Aerolite medical interiors.

Lepine, a former paramedic, acknowledged that Ornge didn't ensure that the helicopter interiors were suitable when it made the deal.

"I think it was an absolute failure of process that there was no prototype done," he told a legislative committee.

"That would have been caught if we had done a prototype and it was not done."

Full Story: http://www.ems1.com/air-medical-transport/articles/1295689-5-incidents-resulting-in-patient-death-linked-to-ORNGE-helicopter-interiors/

BOISE, Idaho — Hours after their plane crashed on a steep and snowy mountainside in Idaho, a California fireman, his wife and their daughter were airlifted to safety by National Guard rescuers.

The family was en route from California to Mountain Home, Idaho, when their Cessna 172 went down Saturday night, leaving them with head and back injuries, officials said.

One of them used a cellphone just after midnight to report that they had survived the crash.

A medical helicopter located the wreckage Sunday morning, but whiteout conditions prevented the aircraft crew from carrying out an immediate rescue, said Col. Tim Marsano of the Idaho National Guard.

Rescuers who walked through 6-foot snowdrifts and on 60-degree slopes reached the crash site first. They wrapped the family members in blankets and built a fire until a military helicopter could lift them out with a hoist.

"It was inhospitable for a landing," Marsano said. "The use of the helicopter was indispensable for this type of rescue operation."

The three were flown one at a time to a landing area about a half-mile from War Eagle Mountain in southwest Idaho's Owyhee County. They were later flown to Saint Alphonsus Regional Medical Center in Boise, where they remain in stable condition Monday.

Source: www.ems1.com

BALTIMORE, Md. — If you are severely injured, a helicopter flight to a top-level trauma center will boost your chance of survival over ground transport. That’s the conclusion of a rigorous, national comparison of the effectiveness of helicopter versus ground emergency medical services, published in the April 18, 2012, issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Survival after trauma has increased in recent years with improvements in emergency medical services coupled with the rapid transportation of trauma patients to centers capable of providing the most advanced care. What has not been clear until this study, is the effectiveness of helicopter emergency medical services (HEMS), a limited and expensive resource, compared to its alternative, ground emergency medical services (GEMS).

“We looked at the sickest patients with the most severe injuries and applied sophisticated statistical analyses to the largest aggregation of trauma data in the world,” says the study’s principal investigator, Samuel M. Galvagno Jr., D.O., Ph.D., assistant professor, Department of Anesthesiology, Divisions of Trauma Anesthesiology and Critical Care Medicine, University of Maryland School of Medicine. “We were careful at every step to balance all the potential other factors that could explain any benefit of the helicopter. After all that, the survival advantage of helicopters remained,” says Galvagno.

For this study, Dr. Galvagno developed the most rigorous comparison of helicopter and ground transport to date. He and his team tracked patients meeting certain criteria who were listed in the 2007-2009 version of the American College of Surgeons (ACS) National Trauma Data Bank (NTDB). The NTDB contains more than 1.8 million patient records from more than 900 centers in the United States.
Dr. Galvagno and his team conclude that the helicopter is associated with a 16 percent increased rate of survival for the 156,511 patients transported to Level I trauma centers. That percentage means 65 patients must be transported to save one life. The 64,964 patients who went by chopper to Level II trauma centers had a 15 percent survival advantage, meaning 69 must be transported to save one life.

http://jama.ama-assn.org/content/307/15/1602.abstract

This study was performed without any commercial funding or extramural sponsorship. Dr. Galvagno was funded, in part, by an institutional training grant when this study was initiated as part of his Ph.D. program at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Full Story: http://www.ems1.com/air-medical-transport/articles/1272889-Study-Helicopter-beats-ambulance-for-trauma-patients-8206/