By GRAHAM REID
When Malcolm Beattie and Bob Harvey, now the Mayor of Waitakere City, jumped from a hovering helicopter at Mission Bay 30 years ago they wrote themselves into local history. And Beattie wrote off his knee.
The event was a presentation to the board of Rothmans, says Beattie, now executive chairman of the Auckland Rescue Helicopter Trust, as he sits in the modest, waterfront boardroom of the multi-million-dollar business.
Back then the avid west coast surf lifesavers and rising marketing men wanted to convince Rothmans there was merit in a rescue helicopter. They were looking to the tobacco company to match their enthusiasm with sponsorship. However, a practical demonstration was needed. "Because civil aviation weren't used to people jumping out of helicopters, they said we'd have to do it from 1000 feet. We said we'd kill ourselves. So they said we could come lower and jump from about 45 or 50 feet, which was still bullshit because you can jump from 6 feet with a helicopter. But we came right down and jumped.
"Unfortunately I landed on a sandbank. I had to hobble up the beach to [Rothmans Sports Foundation director and former SAS commanding officer] Colonel Frank Rennie and say, 'Wasn't that marvellous?' They agreed, then went off in their cars. I turned to Harvey and said, 'Get me to the doctor.'
Beattie - who walks with what colleagues refer to as "the Beattie shuffle" - is recounting with discernible pride the growth of the air rescue service, from picking up swimmers or surfers in difficulty into the internationally expansionist, vigorously marketed and multi-sponsored operation it is today.
However, a chopper - the present BK 117 is leased from Helilink and distinctively branded in red and yellow livery as the Westpac Trust Rescue Helicopter - is still the icon of the operation. As general manager Scotty Watson concedes, "It's a grunty thing to market and has high local visibility."
Visibility helped no doubt by the work of the chopper and crew being the subject of the high-rating, 10-part TV2 series Rescue One.
Three decades on from the Beattie-Harvey Great Leap Downward the Auckland Rescue Helicopter Trust has a full-time staff of 64, a telemarketing team raising funds selling $30 teddy bears, employs six permanent helicopter crew and six paramedics, and in October extended its operation into Northland.
It's a big organisation split into two parallel trusts: the familiar rescue helicopter trust and the ChildFlight Charitable Trust, which oversees the Pacific Air Ambulance service established in 1991 and the ChildFlight fixed-wing division to bring sick and injured children and their families to Starship Hospital.
"We aggressively attacked the air ambulance market because no one was doing it," says Watson, who has been with the organisation since 1988, two years before it separated from surf lifesaving origins to become an independent trust.
Today, under Watson's overview, the Pacific Air Ambulance averages two mercy flights daily around the Pacific and is an expanding medical retrieval service. It repatriates patients (often elderly Americans through a contract with Princess Cruises) or brings home New Zealanders in difficulty from points as far abroad as the US and Asia.
Watson also speaks of recent air ambulance contracts with the US Marines for eight weeks when they were engaged in military exercises in Tonga, with the Singaporean Army, and the Mormon Church in the Pacific.
The trust operates a 24-hour, seven-day office at Auckland International Airport and is negotiating for a designated hangar so patients can be taken under cover from aircraft to ambulance rather than being unloaded on the tarmac. There are offices in Sydney and Singapore and another opening in Bangkok. Beattie, who received an OBE for services to the community in 1995, says domestic demand has allowed them to develop an integrated air and road ambulance system.
The organisation, internationally regarded as in the vanguard of air ambulance services, receives no direct government funding but has developed purpose-built stretcher bridges for lifting patients into aircraft and has a major business in the supply of medical oxygen for Air New Zealand. This year its operating budget is between $16 and $20 million.
It's a long way from the trust's first budget in 1990, which was a mere $490,000. And even further from when they were seen as macho airborne cowboys leaping into west coast surf.
"For the first 14 years we were perceived as crazy bastards jumping out of helicopters," says Beattie. "And sometimes people would see us with a bag of fish dangling under the helicopter. It took until the mid-80s before people realised we were medically sound. The medical profession was distrustful. Basically we were MASH: lift them off the beaches, strap them on and fly them somewhere else."
Today the helicopter flies with paramedics and can deliver critically ill patients into intensive care already stabilised.
Yes, there's still a macho culture within the organisation admits Watson - "all present and erect," says one staff member in half-jest - but you can't worry about personal safety on a stormy night when you are winching an injured crewman from a tossing fishing boat somewhere off the Northland coast.
For men who risk their lives as a matter of course Watson offers an off-the record salary which sounds alarmingly low. Clerical pay, we might say. That said, the service boasts a low staff turnover rate, says helicopter manager Greg Brownson, who has been with the organisation for 17 years.
"It's not like a real job. I was a motor mechanic - that's a real job, and I hated it. This is a culture and you have to be passionate about it. I've got a drawer full of CVs of people wanting to get in ... We look for mature and balanced people."
Crewmen work two days on, two nights on, four days off; paramedics do a 24-hour shift.
Brownson speaks of coming on duty and never knowing where you'll end up. The chopper flies to roadside accidents, medical transfers, farm accidents, heart attacks on cruise ships, injured fishermen, someone with their arm caught in factory machinery and, as in the early days, surfers or swimmers.
"Times changed rapidly," says Beattie. "We actually thought we were always going to be surf rescue but in the early 80s I realised that would be limited with the introduction of the rubber boats which meant there would be little need for a chopper."
Although under the umbrella of surf lifesaving, the chopper was carrying out an increasing number of medical emergency and rescue missions, so the creation of the charitable trust in 1990 allowed the service to develop.
Says Beattie: "If you look at our progression it has been built on servicing the growing needs of the market, particularly in the repatriation of tourists as that industry has grown."
Beattie notes that over an eight-week period 27 cruise ships will arrive in Auckland, and the average age on board may well be in the 70s. When the Princess Odyssey arrives, for example, they would expect that about a dozen passengers would require repatriation.
By developing that service here the trust has created an industry of specific medical services and infrastructures which allows the dollars to stay in this country.
As Beattie notes, however, having insurance contracts or dealing with sometimes litigious American patients can mean one mistake and you lose the business. So far they have had only compliments. The patients and insurers are happy. And so are the sponsors.
Today the trust enjoys the support of numerous sponsors beyond the branding of Westpac Trust on the chopper. What they get is association with an organisation doing God's work. Certainly ChildFlight pulls at the heartstrings, admits Watson. People are associated with giving a child a chance of living.
Sponsorship hasn't been without controversy, especially in the early days When a tobacco company was the major underwriter of the the Rothmans-Radio Hauraki rescue helicopter. Dr Frank Rutter, chairman of the Auckland Hospital Board, described as an anomaly that a "life-saving operation should be supported by a life-threatening product."
By 1986 after contributing more than $1 million to the operation which had saved more than 1000 lives, Rothmans withdrew in an amicable separation. The Westpac Banking Corporation, which had sponsored the Australian helicopter service, signed up with the Accident Compensation Commission as co-sponsor.
The service isn't without controversy now either. There has been a sometimes tetchy relationship with St John Ambulance.
In the mid-70s St John objected to the surf rescue service, saying that although it was fast - the chopper back from to the coast to the city in under 10 minutes, an ambulance taking 90 minutes on the bumpy road - patients were endangered because of lack of medical care on board. When larger helicopters allowed for in-flight medical personnel, the argument abated.
Then in 1997 St John brought its own helicopter, tendered for the ACC contract against the trust, and refused to supply paramedics as it had done.
Two years ago, however, St John announced a new era of cooperation. It followed a successful Commerce Commission hearing instigated by the trust to complain that St John was being anti-competitive by routing 111 emergency calls to its own helicopter despite not having the ACC contract. St John has continued unsuccessfully to tender for ACC contracts, and in October the trust undertook the lucrative Northland ACC contract.
But the friction continues and, as of two months ago, the trust is now working with its own land transport ambulance service TransCare.
Because St John's core business is emergency work, says chief paramedic Barry Watkin, himself a former St John worker, their medical taxi role is a secondary service. But the helicopter requires an ambulance at the ready on landing, not one which can be diverted if an emergency comes up.
"TransCare works under our licence but is a separate company. St John are usually good at meeting the helicopter but it wasn't uncommon to have long, unacceptable delays. St John comes if we call, but TransCare is in-house and our first choice."
This development is a manifestation of the private enterprise nature of contemporary health care, also seen in the growth of ChildFlight. As regional hospitals have been downgraded, the trust's work has expanded to flying young patients from around the country to Starship. The decline of intensive care facilities in smaller hospitals means patients also require transfer to major centres. Beattie notes there has been less parochialism as doctors in regional hospitals recognised the need to have patients into specialised care.
With paramedics on board and its own land transport division in TransCare, the trust can claim to operate a fully integrated, highly trained service. And, more than 10,000 missions later, one backed by 30 years' experience.
"The reasons we do this are still the good ones," says Brownson. "It's the patients. The guys are passionate and we wouldn't be in the job if we didn't really care about the patients."
He speaks of kids they've rescued coming in with Mum and Dad to offer thank-you cards, and of a shooting victim - "not sure whether it was an accident or a suicide attempt" - who came in four years later and offered his gratitude. Of course there are those who are rescued from whom they never hear again.
"But we don't feel taken for granted," says Watson. "Maybe I'm kidding myself, but I think when people see us fly past they feel, 'There's our helicopter.' Or, 'We bought a teddy bear for our grandchild,' and feel they have a stake in us. That's the way we like it.
"We're a part of the scenery."
Auckland's air ambulance celebrates 30 years of operation
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