That sounds pretty simple, doesn’t it?  Wikipedia’s definition of air ambulance service is here and provides a little food for thought.  A true air ambulance service is a bit more than some helicopter or fixed wing air craft showing up, bundling in a patient and taking off for the closest hospital.

An air ambulance is an aircraft used for emergency medical assistance in situations where either a traditional ambulance cannot easily or quickly reach the scene or the patient needs to be repositioned at a distance where air transportation is most practical. Air ambulance crews are supplied with equipment that enables them to provide medical treatment to a critically injured or ill patient. Common equipment for air ambulances includes ventilators, medication, an ECG and monitoring unit, CPR equipment, and stretchers.

 

Here are a few of the topics I plan to cover in this series:

• History of air ambulance services
• Survey of availability of medevac, air evacuation and similar services today
• How to select an air ambulance service
• How to find a career in the air ambulance industry
• Where the air ambulance industry should be in the future.

I have quite an interest in this area as I come from a background that involved quite a bit of the history of medical evacuations and air ambulance work in the North America scheme of things.  I was born in 1945 and the world was still young enough when I grew up to be able to appreciate aviation.

One of my influential tutors/mentors was a fellow named Eddie Gorski who was first soloed by another pilot name of Joe Crosson, a true Alaskan pioneer in air ambulance and mercy mission work.  So as far as I am concerned, time’s a wasting, let’s get flying or air ambulancing if necessary.

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For those new to the NextGen term, I’ll be posting a few things to help you understand it and help you make your own decisions here.

Let me give you just a snapshot view right now in order to get the stage set.

Everybody (except perhaps the airlines themselves .. more on that later) claims to hate airline delays, but for years the impression was, no one was doing anything about it.

So some ‘legends’ in their own mind in Washington (actually, if you peel away all the layers you are probably going to find some Beltway Bandit or another expects to reap big profits from this) has deiced that if they “change the face” of air transportation in this country we will magically remove |airline delays| from out vocabulary.

Let me give you just one example of how this is going to work.  Let’s imagine for a moment there are just two airports in the US … LAX and JFK.  Even though these are inconveniently located for some folks, they are certainly located ideally for many, and if they are the only choices, a lot of people are going to fly between them every day.

So the airlines are going to sell a lot of tickets, buy a lot of planes and schedule them at the most convenient times to travel between those two important airports.

Seems to be going in almost a straight line, doesn’t it?  Even if you don’t now an airfoil from as fence post you are sure to figure that even if the airplanes all follow the shortest possible path between the airports, sooner or later they are going to bunch up waiting for takeoff or waiting to land.

Enter NextGen.  By using GPS and other “magic” future technologies, NextGen is going to let those planes follow any route they chose so as to get to the other end of their flight faster.

Hmm, but won’t the pilots just all chose the shortest path?  And isn’t the real problem the waiting time to take off and/or land, you ask?

Ah, clearly you have missed the point and failed to grasp the advanced technical superiority of the NextGen idea.  Or else, NextGen supporters are blowing smoke up someone’s ass.

Tune in next time to help yourself decide which explanation is true.

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Air France 447 Investigation Interim Report

The BEA Interim Report (PDF) released Thursday covering the crash of Air France Flight 447 shows a span of more than nine hours between the last message received from the flight’s crew and the launch of a first rescue aircraft. Though communications on oversea flights can be sparse, the rescue launch order was still a full eight hours from the interval at which time the aircraft sent 24 messages showing onboard faults and system failures. When debris was found, it consisted mainly of light items from all areas of the plane. No evidence of fire or explosion has yet been discovered. Distortions in the metal vertical reinforcements of specific debris "showed evidence of great compressive forces" with crumpled walls and ceilings that were deformed downward while the floor "was curved under the effect of a strong upward pressure from below." This suggests, and investigators have publicly stated, that the aircraft hit hard in a rather level attitude. The translated report summarizes it less obviously stating, "Visual examination showed that the airplane was not destroyed in flight; it appears to have struck the surface of the sea in a straight line with high vertical acceleration." (There is some speculation as to the exact meaning of "in a straight line," which may have translated directly to "in the line of flight," but may have been intended to mean "in a level attitude," or simply that the aircraft had negligible yaw at impact.)

Weather at the time of the accident as depicted by infrared images seven minutes before and after the last ACARS message show "the general conditions and the position of Inter-tropical Convergence Zone over the Atlantic were normal for the month of June." However, investigators publicly announced that experienced teams working in simulators struggled to maintain control of the aircraft at cruise in turbulence with faulty air data. Messages sent automatically by the Airbus A330 accident aircraft show the aircraft was providing unreliable or conflicting air data to the pilots. The pilots were operating the aircraft at high altitude in turbulent conditions with forecast temperatures that were higher than normal (standard plus 13 degrees Celsius) making the thin air thinner and trimming controllability margins for the two co-pilots. Normal procedures suggest the captain may have been in the crew rest quarters at the onset of system failures. Without voice and data recorders, we may never know.

In keeping with the title I chose, indeed, we may never know, and I ask why.  There is no excuse except or willingness to accept mediocrity.  We don’t need bushels of money nor advances in thecholgy beyound what we already have to avoid another case like this, where we may never know.  We do, though, need pilots, airline executives, national and international government and NGO officials to actually give some thought to doing their jobs better instead of using money as a lame excuse and waiting out their retirement pensions.  Here’s what we could do, right now in the year 2009, to virtually eliminate this type of tragedy:

• Track all commercial aircraft take off to landing, with emphasis on flights going over ocean. 
• Monitor manually (as a backup to the suggestion above) all flights over ocean, using nothing but existing resources
• Design an install (at minimal cost) digital replacements for today’s archaic crash recorder boxes
• Using existing communication links, off load the data from those boxes in flight
• Use simple, dirt cheap video/audio cockpit monitoring to insure aircrews and ground controllers follow procedures
• Using this recording technology hold pilots, airline management and ground services to the standards they already are paid to uphold.

Read on and I will tell you how I feel this can be accomplished sooner, rather than later.

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1. Working soft and playing hard
2. Becoming too wrapped up in the fame game
3. Searching for the silver bullet
4. Analysis Paralysis
5. Focusing on the “thrill of the chase”

Next week, I’ll be making one post per day that focuses on each of the above. Sometimes we can have the plan and we can have the drive, but we still find ourselves stagnant. They say hindsight is 20/20 and after ten years in the industry, I’ve acquired a bit of it.

One of the reasons I can identify the above is that at some point in time, I was also guilty of doing some things on this list and keeping myself and my business from experiencing the growth it could have during those times. I’ve also seen friends struggle with them as well.

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photo credit: dinornis

and the next

photo credit: Global Jet

and the next

photo credit: steve9567

Probably this one but some more:

photo credit: dibaer

If heavily cropped. perhaps

photo credit: PhillipC

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Blog Traffic Tips Newsletter by Yaro Starak

This often neglected advertising method
can generate thousands of extra dollars
per month from your blog.

Learn more below…

———————
To exclude yourself from all future mailings click the link at the end of this email. To sign yourself up for this no-cost email newsletter visit – http://www.BlogTrafficKing.com
———————

Hello Dave,

Today we are going to focus on making money from your blog using direct ad sales.

Direct ad sales means you communicate directly with advertisers who pay a fee to have their promotion running on your blog. You do not use a third party “middleman” to deal with advertisers, consequently you have to do more work to locate and manage your advertisers, but you earn more because you don’t have to pay a percentage fee to an ad broker.

BEFORE GOOGLE

Back in 1999, before Google was around, I made money selling advertising on my hobby sites as a university student. Back then the advertising industry was all about banner ads and I made about $500-$1000 a month selling banner ad space on my sites to sponsors. Because of website income I never needed a part time job during my university years.

Today we have many more options to monetize our blogs, including contextual ads (Google AdSense), text links, reviews, banners and a whole range of companies who provide advertising brokering services. I still choose to sell ads directly on my blog for one main benefit – you make more money
- but I also use all the other options as well.

As an example, if you use a service like Text-Link-Ads.com to sell text links the advertiser might spend $100 to buy a link on your blog, from which you will receive 50% of the revenue and the broker takes the other half. If you sell that text link directly yourself, you pocket 100% of the fee.

WHEN IS THE RIGHT TIME TO SELL ADS DIRECTLY?

I recently had a subscriber of my newsletter tell me they had their first private advertiser buy a campaign on their blog. This particular blog was quite new and attracting around 100 visitors a day. With traffic that low I wouldn’t normally recommend selling advertising directly yet because you can’t deliver value to your advertisers.

With 100 daily readers obviously you can’t charge too much. If they are very targeted high value readers – say people looking to buy high priced items like property – then it may be viable to charge more.

I generally advise bloggers to consider selling direct advertising at around $50 a month for a banner campaign or a text link once you have about 500 visitors per day. You can start earlier and charge less, even $10 a month just to get you some cashflow – it never hurts to try – just be careful to consider what value you offer advertisers.

Advertisers usually want traffic or leads or exposure and if you can’t deliver this then you probably shouldn’t sell ads directly. You want to foster a long term relationship with advertisers so they become dependent cashflow sources, and to do this you must deliver results for them. If you make them money they will of course continue to support your blog.

If you already have 1000+ readers then you definitely have the potential to start making a consistent income from direct ad sales. You could generate as much as $1000 additional in-come from selling banners and text links directly to advertisers and this money doesn’t have to come at the expense of your current monetization strategies. You can still use ad brokers and Google AdSense AND sell ads directly to sponsors.

In the next newsletter I’ll explain some tools you can use to set up direct ad sales on your blog.

Here’s to your blogging success,

Yaro Starak

http://www.BlogTrafficSchool.com

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Go there, browse and be the first to add an airport you have been to … either as a pilot or passenger … or write a comment about one that is already on the list. One of the most extensive world-wide lists I have found and an excellent use of Google Maps. Recommended.

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The Internet Wealthmaster has published a concise list on setting up WordPress. Recommended and a tip of the hat.

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I started to post these words as a comment on Kay’s blog, but I think they’ll be better off here.

Very interesting rundown on the Vice Fund phenomenon, Kay. I had no idea these specialty folks were out there.

The line that gave me pause in the description, though, was the catalog of “vices”. Investing in companies in the defense or weapons industry is investing in “vice”, akin to investing in a tobacco company? Wow, I learn something every day.

As someone born at the very end of WWII who went to elementary school learning to “Duck and Cover” and who was working in military satellite operations in the days when the Berlin Wall finally came down, I find the lumping together of those disparate business opportunities strange indeed. I guess the knowledge that my 38 years on the government side of defense, much of it working with or supervising defense contractors was all socially unacceptable is illuminating.

I got a big chuckle the other day when the press suddenly remembered there was a North Korea and ran around “Chicken Littling” for a few days. They seemed to take a lot of comfort in reporting the PACOM had moved a guided missile destroyer to Japan. Of course if they knew that a “guided missile destroyer” doesn’t destroy guided missiles (it uses missiles as its main battery) they might not have been so comforted.

But then again, the Katie Courics and Wall Street analysts would never deign to learn about the seamy underside of society called “defense”, would they? Isn’t “defense” something like some of those deviant sexual practices you hear about on the ‘Net? I take shower after shower and I still feel dirty *sigh*

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