Medic'Air was involved in a challenging medical repatriation recently, when its Falcon 50 flew for 25 hours with an ICU patient from Adelaide, Australia, to Antwerp.

The Belgian patient had suffered a major traffic accident when visiting family and was in hospital in a coma with spinal fractures.

For three weeks she was improving, but maintained in a coma under mechanical ventilation, while an infectious process prevented the neurosurgeon fixing the unstable fracture. Chinese Medic'Air doctors, in accordance with the family's wish, decided to use this period to repatriate the patient.

The Falcon was dispatched from Le Bourget with three attendants, an emergency physician, an intensivist nurse and an anaesthesiologist nurse, who could each take four-hour shifts. From Adelaide, the Falcon reached Bali then Colombo to pick up a third pilot and then stopped in Kuwait where it picked up a fourth pilot. Each leg was done in less than five and a half hours, each stop in less than 45 minutes – assisted by the pilots' presences in Colombo and Kuwait. The last leg to Antwerp lasted six hours and 20 minutes with the patient remaining stable.

Medic'Air has a new Falcon 50EX currently in Geneva to be adapted into a dedicated air ambulance with two ICU stretchers and an electric loading system.