HAI announces award winners
Helicopter Association International (HAI) have announced the recipients of its 2023 Salute to Excellence Awards
The body, which organizes the HAI Heli-Expo conference, will present the awards at a ceremony on 6 March, at this year’s event.
Golden Hour Award
The Golden Hour Award, which recognizes individuals for ‘distinguished and outstanding service utilizing helicopters in air medical transport’, was awarded to David Ellis, Executive Director of Haiti Air Ambulance (HAA).
Ellis was an early recruit to HAA when it was established in 2014, as the sole helicopter emergency medical service (HEMS) in the country. Taking over as HAA’s Executive Director in 2020, he implemented significant changes to operations, shifting away from ‘traditional US HEMS guidelines’ and tailoring the organization more to Haiti’s unique challenges. These include a ‘grossly underequipped and understaffed national ambulance service, gas shortages, impassable roads, and rampant gang violence and roadblocks’, said HAI.
HAI said Ellis has also been ‘instrumental’ in developing ‘relationships with local doctors, hospitals, charities, and service providers’, as well as enabling HAA to carry a family member or friend with every patient transported. Ellis is also credited with improving security in response to rising gang violence across the island nation.
HAI credited Ellis’s improvements with generating an ‘exponential increase’ in the number of flights operated by the service, as well as a ‘monumental’ improvement in transport times. Since the organization’s inception, it has transported over 1,500 patients – 53 per cent of which were transported in the first two years since Ellis took the lead. Additionally, while ground ambulances in Haiti take an average of 205 minutes to reach their destination, HAA averages 26 minutes.
Humanitarian Service Award
The Humanitarian Service Award, which recognizes ‘outstanding service in using rotorcraft to provide aid to those in need’, will be presented to Ananda ‘Andy’ Thapa, the Operations Director of Kathmandu-based Altitude Air.
HAI said Thapa has been credited with ‘hundreds, if not well over 1,000’ technical rescues throughout Nepal and surrounding regions. This includes multiple extractions of climbers from Mount Everest – where he has landed as high as Camp 2, situated at 21,000ft (6,401m) above sea level.
In 2022 alone, he participated in three large rescues:
- He airlifted several climbers from Mount Everest’s Camp 1 and Camp 2
- Evacuated two people from Ama Dablam using a human longline technique, at an altitude of 6,812m
- Rescued 72 Nepalese and foreign visitors from a remote region of Nepal who had been stranded by extreme weather, in collaboration with another company rescue pilot.
One of Thapa’s most notable rescues was in June 2021, in which over 100 people trekked into areas bordering Tibet, from the Nepalese town of Manang, to collect Yarsagumba, a medicinal fungus. Thapa located them all alive at altitudes of between 4,267m and 5,243m, stranded after heavy snowfall, and helped to transport approximately 70 of the most critical patients back to the safe zone within just over two hours. Thapa also assisted in delivering emergency supply drops to the remaining 30 foragers, as fuel ran low and weather deteriorated.
Thapa has also assisted in recovering the mortal remains of climbers who were lost in Nepal’s mountains – notably the body of mountaineer Kim Chang-ho and eight fellow climbers in 2018 – helping to bring closure for families.
Law Enforcement Award
This award, ‘for contributions to the promotion and advancement of rotorcraft in support of law enforcement activities’, has been awarded to Penny Ritter, a Criminalist for Alameda County Sheriff’s Office (ACSO), California. HAI said Ritter had ‘helped to turn the agency’s fledgling small uncrewed aerial system (sUAS) program into an award-winning, nationally recognized initiative’.
As part of her crime lab work, Ritter employed laser scanners to map crime scenes. These skills were later put to use after the Sheriff’s Office began to employ photogrammetry and drone mapping software as part of its drone surveillance operations. Despite Ritter claiming to have ‘no idea how to use the software’ or even ‘knowing what a drone looked like’ at first, the crime scene models generated by her proved to be extremely valuable.
Following the success of the initial trials, the program was expanded and Ritter was recruited to help lead the program. She learned to fly and maintain the county’s drones, and earned a Federal Aviation Administration Part 107 certificate to operate them. She also implemented many of the core organizational strategies used by the program, and built relationships with drone manufacturers and other representatives in the sUAS field.
ACSO credited Ritter with helping to locate and arrest ‘countless’ dangerous individuals, as well as assistance in the reconstruction of crime scenes, such as for the Hart family murders in Mendocino County in 2018 – for which she mapped the scene, producing an orthomosaic map and 3D model used in the coroner’s inquest.
Ritter’s team has also supported the mapping of several wildfires and other disasters in the region, starting with the Tubbs Fire of 2017. The team also mapped the Camp Fire in 2018 – for which Ritter helped lead a task force of 16 different agencies, to conduct 518 sUAS flights over 17,000 acres to collect over 70,000 images of the disaster zone.