In the case of Alicia May Goodwin, 27, who was hit by a truck on South Carolina's Interstate 26 in 2004, ambulance crews offered over the radio to drive her to a trauma center 48 miles away, according to records from the Newberry County Sheriff's Department. They were told to wait for a helicopter - the third to attempt the flight on a foggy July morning. More than an hour later, Goodwin and three medevac crewmembers died in a crash less than a mile away. Before the helicopter crash, Goodwin had suffered what medics and her family's attorney described as a serious leg injury but was not in any immediate danger.
"All the medical experts we could find said she was stable and coherent," said Jeffrey R. Harris, a Georgia attorney who won Goodwin's family an undisclosed settlement from the helicopter's operator. "Getting her into an ambulance and to a trauma center would have been easier."
Some advocates of helicopter transport say a simple assessment ignores one of the key benefits of a medevac system - minimizing the amount of time that patients spend in transit. Because providing medical care can be difficult inside an ambulance or inside a helicopter, limiting the duration of the trip can be the most important concern.
"Think of a hospital as a safe zone," said Jonathan Godfrey, transport coordinator for the Children's National Medical Center in Washington. "When a patient leaves the hospital to go to another hospital, whether by ambulance or by air, the resources available to the medical crew are greatly diminished."
Godfrey, a registered nurse, was the sole survivor of a 2005 crash into the Potomac River, which happened after he and his crew delivered a cardiac patient from Frederick to Washington. The patient, Godfrey said, benefited from the helicopter trip's speed and advanced care, and even the crash has not caused him to question the medical value of flying.
Some recent crashes illustrate the kinds of cases that Godfrey describes.
A flight that crashed in 2004, killing four people, was ferrying a 3-month-old child with pneumonia about 300 miles across rural Texas. The child was in respiratory distress, according to news accounts, and the 1 1/2 hour flight to advanced care might have taken more than four hours by ground.
The flight of a 60-year-old woman with an infection and low blood pressure across Alaska, which crashed last December on the way to a hospital in Anchorage, would have required a ground ambulance to take either a ferry or a 400-mile detour around Prince William Sound.
