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35,000 foot emergency room

  • Published
  • By Lt. Col. Bill Walsh
  • 315th Airlift Wing Public Affairs
PRESTWICK, SCOTLAND --  When you think of an emergency room you might think of a hospital setting with ambulances rolling up at all hours of the night. You think of nurses and doctors working together to save a patient's life. You think of all that equipment that they use to get the job done. Now imagine all that inside an airplane flying at 35,000 feet over a combat zone somewhere in Southwest Asia. That's exactly what the men and women of the 315th Aeromedical Evacuation Squadron do every day.

For Senior Airman Ben Trowbridge, a 22 year old flight medic from New York, this job is a far cry from the high school life he left not too long ago to join the Air Force Reserve. "I went to college for two years and decided to join because I wanted to do more in emergency medicine," he said as he played the role of patient during a training mission over the Scottish highlands.

This airman along with the rest of the crew are training for some of the most critical missions the Air Force flies - aeromedical evacuation. They are the lifesavers in the sky who turn aircraft like the C-17, KC-135 and C-130 into flying hospitals and emergency rooms.

The responsibility is huge and the training vital to carry out their job. Part of that training falls to Master Sgt. James May who, in his civilian life, works for the Robert Bosch Corp., but in his military life is the senior evaluator for aeromedical evacuation or as it's known in the business, aerovac.

"We all come from different background; so repetition is the goal to make all this become second nature," said Sergeant May between barking out orders and giving pointers to the crew he was evaluating. "We live in a continuous training environment," he said when talking about the amount of training that these medical professionals have to undergo just to stay current. That includes check rides every eighteen months along with various procedure specific requirements to keep up with such as CPR.

These aeromedical crews could be called upon to spring into action in a moment's notice. When deployed, they spend months away from home at overseas locations in Europe and Southwest Asia flying wounded warriors off the battlefield and to hospitals in Germany and the United States. They can literally have someone who was wounded in Afghanistan, out of the combat zone and at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany within a matter of hours. This fast pace is what they credit for saving the enormous number of lives during both Operation New Dawn in Iraq and Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan.

This crew was being put to the test by Sergeant May as he ordered a "full arrest" drill when one of the members pretends to go into cardiac arrest and collapses on the floor of the C-17 while at altitude. During the drill, Sergeant May proceeded to tell the attending medics what the patients symptoms were, adding more to the urgency to save a life. "He's got a weak pulse and is now unconscious. What are you going to do next?" he asked the nurse who was in charge of the patient response. "Get me the monitor and crash kit," ordered 1st Lt. Megan Lange, a flight nurse. "Start CPR immediately," she said.

The MCD, or medical crew director, Capt. Dale Yarboro has to balance the communication paths between the medial crew and flight deck crew flying the airplane up in the cockpit. Capt. Steve Stampley of the 317th Airlift Squadron gets updates on the conditions of the patients, especially the critical ones, in order to relay special needs or to change the parameters of the flight itself. "Sometimes we'll get a call from the MCD and we'll need to fly down at 10,000 feet because that's what a patient requires; so we do what's necessary," explained Captain Stampley. "Once in a while we might even have to divert if it's a critical need."

Part of turning these aircraft into flying hospitals requires setting up special stanchions to hold stretchers and outfitting it with all the needed medications and equipment you might find in a normal emergency room.

On this mission, Lt. Col. Steve Bruce of the 317th Airlift Squadron is the aircraft commander with years of experience at the stick. "I love what I do because it really makes a difference," said Colonel Bruce while the flight deck crew ran through their checklists. "In my other life I'm a lawyer." Each of these reservists has another life outside the Air Force and balance the two along with their families. "I missed my daughter's first steps by one day," said Colonel Bruce, clearly sad that he was overseas for such a milestone. That's the kind of sacrifice the men and women of the Air Force and Air Force Reserve make every day.

While most American's celebrate the Memorial Day weekend with cookouts and trips to the beach, these men and women are training hard, a long way from home and their families, in order to save the very lives of those who are celebrated on this holiday.