Avera Health unveils new hangar, new aircraft for Careflight service based in Pierre

Because it’s designed as a “flying Intensive Care Unit,” as part of the Careflight air ambulance service of Avera Health. It is poised and waiting at the Pierre Regional Airport for calls of the most serious kind of medical crisis calling for a patient to get to higher levels of care at a larger hospital.

But many will make the ride.

“We expect to average about one Careflight a day,” said Doug Ekeren, head of Avera’s Emergency Medicine Service Line, to the people in the new hangar about the new service now available for Avera St. Mary’s in Pierre.

Ekeren and other Avera leaders explained to community leaders and curious onlookers that with the new hangar and new aircraft based at the Pierre airport, there’s a new level of emergency health care available.

Avera Health, based in Sioux Falls, started Careflight 30 years ago and has been sending aircraft to Pierre for critically ill patients needing more care. Now instead of a wait of 90 minutes or more for an airplane to get to Pierre, there is a fleet of four aircraft stationed here in Pierre. Now the wait to get a patient in the air winging to Sioux Falls, or the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., or anywhere in the nation,, is only about 15 minutes.

Jim Peitz, owner of Mustang Aviation and the fixed-base operator for general aviation at the Pierre Regional Airport, built the just-completed hangar, leasing it to Avera. When Avera officials first brought the idea to him Peitz said the main thought in his head was “They will save lives.”

With crews and aircraft here in Pierre, on call 24/7, “the turn-around time will be minutes instead of hours,” Peitz said during his remarks at the ribbon-cutting ceremony. He and his family have received a lot from the community, so it was an easy decision for him to hire local contractors to build the hangar. Looking around on Wednesday in what he and others had built, Peitz said, “I promised Avera when this building was finished it would be something to be proud of.”

Gary Olivier had a personal interest in seeing the inside of this new air ambulance. He was impressed by the custom design by Avera medical and flight experts and right down to a custom paint job done in Colorado after it was flown over from Stans, Switzerland. Before Avera, about 1974 in the winter, he was flown from Pierre to Sioux Falls in a small airplane. He had been run over by a snowmobile and had bad internal injuries and needed more help fast.

“Cecil Ice himself flew me. I was unconscious most of the way. It was just me, a nurse and my dad,’ Olivier said, shaking his head and smiling at the memory and how different it was from this Swiss flying ICU. Peitz worked for the legendary Ice who is credited with building up the airport at Pierre. Ice died in 2012. Peitz said it was likely a Piper aircraft that flew Olivier. “We’d pull out a couple seats so we could fit a stretcher in there,” he said of the “air ambulance” of 45 years ago. “It was Spartan.”

The Pilatus PC-12 is a 10-passenger plane, considered one of the best built aircraft, used for top corporate travel but especially known for being customized for air ambulance work, said Brandon Bell, director of Operations for Avera’s Careflight service. The aircraft is used by the dozens in Australia’s Outback, including by the Royal Flying Doctors, because it needs only short runways and is built to land on gravel and grass, Bell told the Capital Journal.

Peitz has flown them and is impressed.

As was Ed Eller, a longtime spray pilot from Onida. He took a close look inside the cockpit and then back at the aerial ICU.

“This has everything a pilot could dream of,” he said.

As customized by Avera to be a winged ICU, the aircraft takes up only four people: the pilot, a nurse, a paramedic and a patient, said Anna Vanden Bosch, clinical care manager for Avera’s Careflight and a nurse who makes her share of flights on the Pilatus with a patient.

The flights can go wherever the patient needs to go to the best care possible, Vanden Bosch said. With a range of about 2,122 miles, the Pilatus can get to Miami or Boston or Los Angeles from Pierre, non-stop, she said.

For Pierre, it’s the best air ambulance for the big spaces that need to be covered to reach medical centers with higher levels of care than Avera St. Mary’s, Vanden Bosch said. A helicopter would take much longer to make such long trips, she said.

The new hangar includes living quarters for the crew so they are right on hand.

It can make all the difference, said Dr. Jared Friedman, clinical vice president of Avera’s emergency medicine service line.

“Time is of the essence in cases of serious trauma, heart attack or stroke,” he said. A 40-minute flight versus a 90-minute wait for a plane to get to Pierre from Sioux Falls before the flight back will save lives, Friedman said.

The flights will cost an average of about $8,000, Avera officials said. So Avera offered “Careflight Membership Applications,” on Wednesday. For $49 a year, a person — and his or her spouse and unmarried dependents under the age of 26 — can be covered for “100 percent of the cost of emergency Careflight transports within the service area.”