Helicopter crews train for worst-case scenarios
The Daily Progress/Andrew Shurtleff
University of Virginia Pegasus pilot Don Chiles (from left) works with Mayo Clinic pilot Chad Liedl and UVa Pegasus pilot Jason Morris to build a shelter of branches during the UVa Health System’s annual Pegasus Medical Transport Network survival training in Wolftown.
WOLFTOWN — Joanne Scott thinks of camping as “tents, and McDonald’s around the corner, and showers.”
But Scott spent part of Saturday afternoon on a farm in Madison County trying to saw apart a downed cedar branch to use as part of a lean-to.
“We’re going to be doing pedicures in here later on,” quipped Scott, a registered nurse who’s part of UVa’s Newborn Emergency Transport Team, as the shelter came together.
All around her were emergency medical personnel wrestling with the same task, each trying to weather the annual survival-training course put on by the University of Virginia Health System’s Pegasus Medical Transport Network. They also learned to signal for help and build fires.
Designed as a course on how to survive a worst-case scenario, the training focused its “roughing it” portion on teaching emergency workers who make transports in helicopters what to do should they become stranded after a crash in a remote area.
Jeff Becker, a helicopter mechanic at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., and an instructor for the survival course, guided Scott’s team as it leaned its shelter together on a patch of relatively unsullied real estate in a field scattered with damp reminders that cows normally graze there.
Becker said that before training programs like Pegasus’, most emergency crews only got as close as a video or a computer simulation when it came to wilderness survival training.
Bob Knox, a flight nurse with Pegasus, said the training — which included an indoor conference component earlier in the day at the Doubletree Hotel Charlottesville — can be intimidating once the class moves outside.
“It’s a mental thing that they need to get over,” said Knox, who’s worked with the survival program since it began 17 years ago. Trainees, in the end, “see their fears and realize there’s not much to be afraid of.”
Despite the current economy, the course still drew people from at least seven states and Canada, Knox said.
Admittedly, clear skies and temperatures in the mid-60s on Saturday made surviving easier.
But, “There have been years up here where it snowed and rained and it was miserable,” said Donna Jordan, a flight nurse with Pegasus.
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