Medical evacuation training means the Air Force is always ready when needed

We were given the opportunity Wednesday to watch a medical evacuation training run aboard a C-17 Globemaster III. The wounded people in this case were dummies being delivered to their destination.

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News Center 7 Reporter Mason Fletcher spent the day with Air Force reservists during their training run across five states.

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“For example, Hurricane Katrina, we were flying these aircraft down there and we were getting civilians,” U.S. Air Force Reservist Nate Copen said.

The training session took News Center 7 from a bus to the plane, where airmen prepared the wounded to be brought on board. Once we took off, crews responded to simulated emergency situations on board.

“So scenarios such as cardiac arrest, seizures, a patient could be choking,” Copen said. “We begin we run through these motions.”

The medical evacuation trainings are part of the mission of the 445th Airlift Wing, which is to “attain and maintain operational readiness; provide strategic transports of personnel and equipment; provide aeromedical evacuation.

The 445th Airlift Wing is under the Air Force Reserve Command, Robins Air Force Base, Georgia. The wing right now has nine C-17 Globemaster II aircraft, called by the Reserve Command “the newest, most flexible cargo aircraft to enter the airlift force.”

One of the scenarios News Center 7 witnessed during the training run involved low levels of oxygen, which prompted the crew to put on their masks.

The weekly training sessions are meant to decrease the stress that a real situation would create, according to the Air Force.

“We want to make sure that, you know, if we get called tomorrow, we have crews ready readily available,” Copen said.

Eighty percent of the medical evacuations are performed by Air Force Reserves, meaning they have other jobs they work outside of what they do for the military.

“I worked for Premier Health and Kettering,” Copen said. “I’ve worked at both facilities.”

Another reservist, Kevin Farkiewicz, said, “I kind of like the life it gives you. You get to stay at this base. So I’m not going to get moved around at all.”

Farkiewicz is an emergency room nurse and is in graduate school. He has been putting his nursing skills to use in the Air Force since he graduated from school in December. His first real mission involved an evacuation from a base in Maryland.

“We pick up a crew of her, a patient load of around 20 patients with what we had,” he said. “And we we just make stops all down the East Coast and around the US, dropping patients off at every stop. So pretty much similar to this [training session]. Very similar to this.”

The 445th Airlift Wing was activated at Wright-Patterson AFB in October 1994. The wing was active after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, by airlifting supplies, medical teams and FEMA personnel to McGuire AFB, New Jersey, to assist with operations involving the Word Trade Center collapse in New York City. The wing also participated in Operation Enduring Freedom as the first wing to fly Taliban and al-Qaeda detainees to Guantanamo Bay Naval Station, Cuba.

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