Norway: Airbus, Norwegian Air Ambulance Foundation to develop CityAirbus NextGen’s future medical missions

Air­bus is col­lab­o­rat­ing with the Nor­we­gian Air Ambu­lance Foun­da­tion (NAAF) to devel­op CityAir­bus NextGen’s future mis­sions for med­ical ser­vices in Nor­way, reports a press release.

This part­ner­ship is to mea­sure the added val­ue of eVTOL air­craft for var­i­ous med­ical ser­vices across the coun­try and inte­grate the oper­a­tional require­ments into the con­fig­u­ra­tion of the CityAir­bus NextGen.

The part­ners will elab­o­rate “a com­pre­hen­sive roadmap toward reduc­ing emer­gency response time through the researched sce­nar­ios in Nor­way,” explains the release, “and fol­low a long-term strate­gic approach to research the com­ple­men­tar­i­ty of exist­ing assets, such as con­ven­tion­al heli­copters, and eVTOLs when the tech­nol­o­gy enters into ser­vice.” This approach can then be expand­ed with oth­er coun­tries to opti­mise oper­a­tions beyond the nation­al health­care sys­tem.

Balk­iz Sar­i­han, Head of Urban Air Mobil­i­ty at Air­bus, com­ment­ed, “The Nor­we­gian Air Ambu­lance Foun­da­tion has always been at the fore­front of med­ical inno­va­tion, most recent­ly with ded­i­cat­ed research to inte­grate a CT scan­ner into a five-blad­ed H145 heli­copter.”

She con­tin­ued, “We’re look­ing for­ward to work­ing with the NAAF as a strate­gic part­ner to fur­ther devel­op the exact mis­sions where our eVTOL’s capa­bil­i­ties would con­tribute to pro­tect­ing cit­i­zens and mak­ing sure they can access effec­tive health­care in Nor­way.”

Balk­iz Sar­i­han

Prof. Hans-Morten Los­sius, Sec­re­tary Gen­er­al of the NAAF, added, “Com­ple­men­tar­i­ty is a key dri­ver in this endeav­our. Heli­copters remain essen­tial to per­form EMS mis­sions, whilst eVTOLs can bring addi­tion­al capa­bil­i­ties to sup­port first respon­ders, for instance by trans­port­ing med­ical spe­cial­ists to acci­dent scenes or organs from one med­ical site to anoth­er.”

As an ini­tial step, an eval­u­a­tion of the present effi­cien­cy of the emer­gency med­ical sys­tem in Nor­way will take place, to then sim­u­late dif­fer­ent air med­ical ser­vices sce­nar­ios by inte­grat­ing advanced air mobil­i­ty assets. The part­ners “will dri­ve the def­i­n­i­tion of the foun­da­tion­al ele­ments of the eVTOL ecosys­tem in the coun­try, includ­ing for infra­struc­ture, traf­fic man­age­ment and ener­gy sourc­ing and dis­tri­b­u­tion.”

Back­ground

Oper­at­ing a mixed fleet of H135 and H145, the Nor­we­gian Air Ambu­lance (NAA) is Norway’s nation­al Heli­copter Emer­gency Med­ical Ser­vice oper­a­tor. With more than 40 years of expe­ri­ence in med­ical response, NAA sup­ports pre-hos­pi­tal care across the coun­try by deliv­er­ing air ambu­lance ser­vices to pro­vide patients with state-of-the-art med­ical solu­tions and equip­ment.

For more infor­ma­tion

https://www.airbus.com/en/innovation/zero-emission/urban-air-mobility/cityairbus-nextgen

https://airambulance-forum.info

(Top image: Air­bus)