UK air ambulances receive £200,000 from Civil Aviation Authority

Emergency services in Gloucestershire, Worcestershire, Somerset, Sussex and London will benefit from a share of more than £200,000 of funding to allow air ambulances to land more safely in poor weather conditions.

Almondsbury Helicopter Airbase, Strensham Airbase, Henstridge Airfield, Royal Sussex County Hospital and King’s College Hospital are all successful applicants of the GNSS Program, which is run by the UK Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) and Department for Transport. The first three airbases are home to Great Western Air Ambulance (GWAA), the Midlands Air Ambulance (MAA), and Dorset and Somerset Air Ambulance (DSAA), respectively.

The funding will support blue light landing sites by putting in new systems to allow helicopters to operate in challenging conditions that previously they may not have been able to.

Help at Henstridge

DSAA flies from one of the selected bases – Henstridge Airbase – and have given an example of the issues it has faced there.

The DSAA explained that visibility and cloud levels at the airbase can cause problems, as, if the cloud level is below minimum visual levels, its Critical Care Team are unable to travel by air to reach patients. Additionally, if the team is already on a mission and the weather deteriorates back at the base, the aircraft could become stranded in a field or at hospital, resulting in a loss of operating hours and patients possibly not be reached.

The charity gave the example from March this year that its aircraft could not return to base after a job one evening due to low cloud at Henstridge. Instead, it had to spend the night at a different heliport at the edge of its region and was not able to return until the weather had cleared during the middle of the next day.

With the advent of GNSS satellites and the 3D information they can provide, airfield approaches can now be made without having to rely on traditional ground-based systems. In the case of above, A GNSS approach would have enabled the aircraft to return to base, be restocked and re-equipped ready for another job that evening, and subsequently available for the day crew to respond to further taskings the next day.

As DSAA’s AW169 helicopter is equipped to carry out GNSS approaches and its pilots are licenced to fly them, the charity submitted a bid to the CAA at the end of September 2022.

The DSAA said: “We are delighted with the news that Henstridge Airfield is now part of the GNSS program as it fully supports the charity’s commitment to reaching more patients who need critical care.”