Thunder Down Under: The Royal Flying Doctor Service of Australia

Map of RFDS regions in Australia
[click map to enlarge image]

By Vic Midyett

I have mentioned the Royal Flying Doctor Service (RFDS) in more than one previous article. The RFDS uses two types of planes in Western Australia: propeller planes, of which it has 16, for landing on dirt strips on farms or on highways, and a jet, of which it has one.

    The propellered Pilatus PC-12 aircraft has an aero medical fit-out that transforms the planes into flying intensive care units. The current fleet of PC-12 aircraft in Western Australia flew a total of 7,634,000 kilometres last year alone, making 15,886 landings.
    As the global launch partner of Pilatus, the RFDS in Western Australia will be the first recipient of PC-24 jets, receiving a fleet of three beginning in the first half of 2018. This aircraft is revolutionizing aero medicine for the RFDS, delivering increased fuel efficiency and, with twice the cruising speed of the PC-12, improving both operational and patient outcomes.

    The RFDS in Western Australia has one Hawker 800XP jet, dubbed the Rio Tinto Life Flight Jet. The jet is located at the Perth Domestic Airport and has the ability to transfer up to three stretchered patients and up to three seated staff/patients at once. It’s the only permanently configured aero medical jet anywhere in Australia, can fly to any location within Western Australia in under three hours, and can in most circumstances transfer interstate without refuelling.

The subject of the RFDS comes up again now, because, as I mentioned in my February 8 article, “Let’s go for an airplane ride!,” my neighbor Jamie has just realized his dream to fly for the RFDS.
    Jamie grew up on a sheep station. (During my late teens – in the late 1960s – I myself worked on what is, or was, considered a very small sheep station, only 7,500 acres!) From the day Jamie first heard of the RFDS, his boyhood dream was to be a pilot for them, but he never thought that it could become a reality.
    But then, one day during his early 20’s, he was a passenger with three others in an automobile that was involved in a bad accident on a two-lane highway out of town. The RFDS was contacted, and a plane that was returning to Perth after delivering a patient to a regional hospital landed at the crash site and managed to deliver all four occupants of the car to a Perth hospital within two hours. Two passengers had broken necks, the driver had multiple broken bones, and Jamie had what he describes as a “severely messed-up back.” Because they got medical attention so quickly, all but one of the individuals recovered fully. The fourth now has only minimal use of one of his arms, because, as Jamie says, “He had half the door stuck in it.”
    Jamie, who says he went in and out of consciousness, was is such awe and admiration of the RFDS crew and pilot, he decided right then that he just had to do whatever it took be a part of the organization. The RFDS had probably saved all four of their lives. It was the crew’s intense skill, expertise, and selfless caring that drove Jamie to learn how to fly and hope that one day he might become an RFDS pilot. RFDS pilots were, in Jamie’s mind, the elite of the elite in every way, using their skills for folks in their most vulnerable and needy moment. Jamie wanted to share their sense of leading a life of meaning and purpose. He could think of no greater honour than to achieve this goal.

After several years of training, seeking out other RFDS pilots and instructors to apprentice with, and putting in his due time in a private charter company, he finally got the invitation to apply to the RFDS, after which many weeks followed of “jumping through hoops” and having his piloting skills tested. One test was having to react to full engine failure. The instructor administered this test by way of computer control from the co-pilot’s seat while at several thousand feet of elevation. The plane rolled onto its left wing and Jamie was able to restart it, regain full control, and level the plane’s flight after losing only 150 feet of altitude – the allowed elevation loss for the test is 500 feet. The instructor said Jamie’s result was the best he had seen.
    After a hundred hours of on-the-job flying experience, which will be based here in Perth, Jamie and his family will move to the Pilbara town of Port Hedland for at least two years until they are based back in Perth again.
    Shirley and I will sorely miss our neighbors. Jamie’s wife, Tina, who has actually been the family’s main bread winner as an engineer, is quitting her job to support Jamie during this time and concentrate on being a mom to their three- and six-year-old girls. Her employer has assured her that she will have a job when they return, and competing companies have told her, “If they don’t take you back, we will.”

Here is an informative video about the RFDS, from their website:


    And a recent article in The West Australian, “New jets to bolster the essential Royal Flying Doctor Service fleet,” includes a link to a local television station’s report about the RFDS’s new airplanes.
    And here are two documentaries that I think are well done:


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In closing, I feel the need to acknowledge the special men and women who work as responders in our society: the police, fire-fighters, medics, nurses, doctors, 911 operators, employees in suicide-prevention call centers. How do such people maintain their emotional balance, seemingly leap-frogging over disastrous outcomes to the next possibly joyous ones, always with hope in their hearts? For what they do, they have my tearful, grateful admiration and thanks as heroes. They are strong and very special.
    If there is anyone reading this who may as a passer-by have seen someone in need and stopped to help, but feel that you “could not go on” if your job was to be a responder day in and day out, please do not beat yourself up. Not everyone can do that job. All of these people have their very special learned skills. What they are not taught is the desire to be of help, which comes from an incomprehensible place within, but a place that I am eternally thankful exists in the individuals I pay homage to. Bless them all. Bless them. Bless them.

Copyright © 2018 by Vic Midyett