The last couple of days Babcock Scandinavia Air Ambulance have had problems with lots of aircraft in their fleet. A whooping 5 of 11 planes of the type Beech B250 Kingair have been grounded due to technical problems, all planes may have to be grounded.
Problems include
-Anti Collision system not working, sends false messages
-TCAS system isn’t working
-Pilots Standbysystem isn’t working, saying the aircraft is banking to the side while flying straight
-Surging of engines
Many faults have happened during the same flight.
Since 1st of July, UNN (Universitetssykehuset Nord Norge), the hospital in Tromsø, have recorded 286 incidents of delayed patients due to the air ambulance.
The situation is critical due to travel times being high in northern Norway. If a patient were to be be transferred from Hammerfest to Tromsø, travel times would be 7 hours and 45 minutes with car, and flight time being only 40 minutes.
A doctor who previously worked for Babcock has resigned. In his resignation letter he wrote “I’d rather be a doctor in a war zone rather than flying air ambulance in northern Norway”
He has also said to the media that on one of his first flights, he heard pull up, pull up, and the pilot saying there were collision course.
Also on the last couple of days lots of politicians want the air ambulance service to be operated by the government.
Why is it so dangerous? Just curious. Atleast here they seem to have recent aircraft and decent funding. They don’t seem to do much crazy risky stuff, just ferry flights around the city. I’m not really doubting you, just in my experience it doesn’t appear to dangerous…
Companies want aircraft to fly no matter what. NTSB just released a helicopter accident that was on an air ambulance. The flight was denied three times and was accepted, the company said if the crew meet x amount of hours they’d buy them massage chairs for them.
The recent one in Alaska was also denied by another company due to wx