Design of an air ambulance aircraft for the Australian environment

Australia is a large country with the majority of its population living in capital cities on the coast line. The inland part of the county, also referred to as the Outback, is sparsely populated and not easily accessible. The Royal Flying Doctor Service (RFDS) is a national organisation providing Australia an airborne medical transport and emergency paramedic service. Currently the RFDS covers an area of 7,150,000 km2, flying on average 65,544 km a day. Their fleet consists of about 60 aircraft, flying of 21 bases Australia wide. The performance of the aircraft that the RFDS uses are critical to the quality of their services they provide. To date, there has never been a custom build Air Ambulance, neither in Australia, or the rest of the world, a surprising fact, when it is considered that there or over 100 Aero-Medical companies operating in the USA. The aircraft currently in use are converted business or light regional aircraft that were not designed specifically for MediVac operations. These conversions are both time consuming and costly, with the last purchase and refit costing the RFDS over 8 million Australian dollars. This formed the basis of an undergraduate student design project to design an aircraft specifically for MediVac operations. The Request for Proposal was drawn up Air Ambulance Victoria whose staff also provided valuable support to the students. This paper gives a summary of the findings of that design project.