DRF Luftrettung celebrates 50th birthday

The organization, which now operates nationwide, launched its first helicopter rescue mission in March 1973. To celebrate this historic milestone, a range of events are planned throughout 2023 across Germany, based around the theme of ‘saving lives from the air’.

“We have decided to celebrate the 50th anniversary of operations next year,” said Dr Krystian Pracz, CEO of DRF Luftrettung. “When we look back on five decades of DRF air rescue, we are grateful and proud that we were able to go this way and help so many people. I would like to take this opportunity to thank all partners and companions who made our development into one of Europe's leading air rescue organizations possible in the first place.

“Tenacity and a belief in the meaning of their actions characterized the people who built up the DRF Air Rescue. We have retained these virtues, because even today it is still part of our self-image to consistently promote the development of air rescue for the benefit of our patients,” he added.

DRF was founded in part to counteract a rise in motoring fatalities

Prior to its establishment in 1972 as ‘Deutsche Rettungsflugwacht’ (DRF), ‘air rescue was considered by the public to be unnecessary, too expensive and exaggerated’, while even ground-based rescue services ‘practically did not exist’, the organization said in a statement. In addition, Germany had ‘no standard emergency number, no emergency call columns, hardly any rescue control centers, and only a few legal regulations in most federal states’.

This lack of organized rescue services, in parallel with a rise in mass car ownership resulted in the number of road traffic fatalities rising to a record level of around 20,000 deaths per year in 1970. DRF Luftrettung was formed in part to counteract this situation, with founding members including Dr Fritz Bühler, lna von Koenig, Günter Kurfiss, Klaus Müller, Alexander Piltz, Siegfried Steiger and Dr Jan Zahradnicek.

DRF has carried out more than a million missions

From a single initial base at Stuttgart Airport, the DRF Luftrettung Group now operates more than 50 helicopters from 37 bases in Germany, Austria, Liechtenstein and Switzerland, and also operates international medical repatriation flights worldwide. The organization has also carried out more than one million missions since its establishment – including 19,791 call-outs in the first half of 2022.

Along the way, it has also achieved various milestones, including the commissioning of Germany’s first intensive transport helicopter in Munich in 1991; the first use of night vision devices by a civil air rescue organization in 2009.

DRF Luftrettung also welcomed the first seven trainee pilots under its commercial pilot training scheme on 1 September – the first time in its history that it has trained pilots from outside its organization.