March 01, 2010

In battle, they call it the “Golden Hour”. The 60 minute period in which the doctors have the chance to save a life if they can get to the wounded in time. In the surf rescue helicopter business, that same window is called the “Golden Minute”.

Every second counts in the surf rescue business. If you’re up to your nose in seawater and the land is receding faster than an Englishman’s hairline, you sometimes have only a few minutes before your life expectancy diminishes to the point of hopelessness. And the crew of the Westpac Life Saver Rescue Helicopter knows that, so they don’t muck around.
“From the time we get the call to the time we are airborne, is an average of four minutes,” says Chief Pilot, Peter Yates, “often we can do it faster”.

“From our base, we can reach either the Royal National Park or Sydney Harbour inside 6 minutes”.

And it’s not as if they’re not busy either. In the past year, they’ve been called out on average once a day.
“People get washed off rocks, go missing in the surf, boats go missing or start sinking, we get called to all sorts of water related incidents”, says Peter. In the helicopter, Peter has one air crewman, who is the winch operator, and one rescue crewmen. Between them, they have saved hundreds of lives.

History

The Westpac Life Saver Rescue Helicopter Service was established by Surf Life Saving Australia in 1973 with a sponsorship of $25,000 from the Bank of New South Wales (now Westpac). The Service began with a Bell 47 G helicopter, a pilot and volunteer surf lifesavers who would be dropped or winched into the sea by a rope to rescue swimmers. Over that first summer, the crew flew 78 missions.
Since then, the Service has chalked up more than 21,000 missions, ranging from urgent patient transfers to dangerous search and rescue operations. It’s the oldest community based helicopter rescue service in the world and remarkably in this day and age of user pays, it remains a free service. And more remarkably for a service which is obviously so important to the community, it receives no government support at all. The $2 million a year required to keep the helicopter in the air, is all funded by sponsorship and fundraisers.
“Of course, the amount of time we can be on duty is dependent on our funding,” says Peter.

“We would love to be on call 24/7, but at the moment we can only operate 10 hours a day during the daylight hours. We are actively looking for more sponsorship so we can extend those hours.”

Thanks to Westpac’s continued support, the service has a new state of the art, purpose built facility at Cape Banks, in the Botany Bay National Park, at La Perouse on Sydney’s coast, near Kingsford Smith airport. This is situated less than 200 meters from the coast giving the helicopter quick access to the coastal waters and cliffs. It’s a prime location for a rescue helicopter. Around 30% of their calls to rescue rock fishermen occur within 20km of the base. And most of the boat rescues and potential drownings occur within 10 km of the base. If you set up a shop, it pays to set up where the customers are.

An airspace problem

But as anyone who lives in Sydney will tell you, living so close to the coast means you also live close to Sydney Airport. For the Lifesaver helicopter, this has created an administrative problem which is costing them vital seconds on many of their rescue missions.
To get just about anywhere along the coastline of Sydney, a pilot must travel along the lane called Victor One. It’s a narrow strip of airspace, north to south over the water, which light aircraft can use without requiring a clearance. It’s mainly for joy flights at 500 feet, but it’s also the path along which the rescue helicopter must travel to get to the places along the coast it is required.
“Our new base is in controlled airspace and we require a clearance to go from the pad to Victor One,” explains Peter.

“It’s only 300m but getting a clearance can often delay our departure by several minutes.

“It’s not the controllers fault, it’s just that the process is not always instantaneous because the tower controller has to coordinate with the departures controller.”

In the past, when the service operated from nearby Prince Henry Hospital, Airservices gave it an exemption which allowed the helicopter to take off and travel the short distance into Victor One without requiring controller’s permission. But since the move to the new La Perouse base, the service has approached Airservices twice for a new letter of agreement and been knocked back, although the reason for the refusal has not yet been made clear to them.

Similar letters of agreement have been granted to other operators and the new base is actually nearer the coast and therefore closer to the lane than Prince Henry Hospital. AOPA President, Phillip Reiss, has vowed to fight on behalf of the Lifesaver service for that letter of agreement.

“As part of AOPA’s commitment to our colleagues in the helicopter business, we are going to try and find out just why the Lifesaver service can’t get a letter of agreement.

“On the surface of it, there does not appear to be a sensible reason to deny them. It looks like bureaucratic buck passing.

“It is common sense that anything which can be done to get the rescue helicopter on location at an emergency more quickly should be a priority for the entire community.”

Of course, the idea of delaying the rescue helicopter means a lot more to anyone floating nose deep in the sea and praying it turns up in the next minute or two.

Pray that it isn’t you next summer.