Charter Spotlight: Swiss Air-Ambulance

Daniel Landert, Head of Jet Operations

Swiss Air-Ambulance has a long tradition in medical patient transport and a pioneering spirit that has made it a brand of excellence. In this interview with Air Charter Guide, the new Head of Jet Operations, Daniel Landert, explains how he intends to capitalize on this expertise to provide patients with an even better experience. Thanks to its Operations Center and its location in the heart of Europe, Swiss Air-Ambulance benefits from ideal conditions for air medical transport, including complex missions.

Patient care from an air ambulance charter operator – how does this work?

Every year, Swiss Air-Ambulance’s three ambulance jets fly to around 400 different airports and airfields around the globe and clock up approximately 4,800 flight hours. Drawing on our extensive operational and logistical expertise, our Operations Center is able to organize missions anywhere in the world quickly and efficiently. In 2023, we organized more than 1,000 repatriation missions.

In practical terms, our medical consultants at the Operations Center determine our clients’ individual requirements in order to submit a customized offer. We then organize the transport right down to the smallest detail. While we are in a position to meet current demand, I am in the process of implementing a number of changes in order to also be able to fulfill clients’ future needs.

As the new Head of Jet Operations at Swiss Air-Ambulance, how do you see your role in shaping the future of your organization?

I am fortunate to be able to draw on Swiss Air-Ambulance’s wealth of experience in the air transport sector. This is reflected in a number of global milestones that it has achieved, such as the first transatlantic flight with a patient on an ECMO machine in 2010. In 2019, Swiss Air-Ambulance also flew a patient attached to a mobile heart-lung machine from London to Kaohsiung in Taiwan on board its new ambulance jet. With a flying time of 14.5 hours, it was the longest flight ever made with an intensive care patient on a heart-lung machine. I intend to build on this tradition of excellence and offer new opportunities to our clients.

Can you give us an example?

Every day we perform operations all over the world on behalf of our patients. In line with our core task, we mostly repatriate patients living in Switzerland. This gives us the opportunity to work with brokers to find the best solution for flying patients to their destinations when our aircraft is empty. By starting from Zurich, in the very heart of Europe, we can cover much of the Mediterranean region without a stopover and even a large part of the world with just one stopover – an ideal opportunity for combining flights.

What are the benefits of combined flights?

These combined flights allow us to make better use of aircraft capacity, resulting in cost and fuel savings. Our Operations Center has an overview of all the current and upcoming missions and can therefore optimize mission planning. Ultimately our clients benefit from the lower costs.

What other advantages does Swiss Air-Ambulance offer?

We employ experienced specialists in medical and nursing care. Thanks to our network, we can integrate other skills or equipment if necessary. Furthermore, to ensure ongoing, high-quality medical training, we work together with the Swiss Institute of Emergency Medicine (SIRMED).

We have been operating three Challenger 650 ambulance jets since 2018. These aircraft have been specially fitted out as flying intensive care units.

On both standard and complex missions, our specialists and equipment enable us to respond as effectively as possible to the needs of our patients. We also provide assistance during disasters – for instance, after the earthquake that hit Turkey and Syria in 2023.

In addition, we are developing new technologies, such as the Patient Isolation Unit (PIU), which can be used to transport highly contagious patients.

What are the latest developments in terms of the PIU?

After the initial success of the PIU, which was developed by Rega in response to the Ebola epidemic in 2014, we analyzed the feedback, particularly from the COVID-19 period. This information has enabled our project team to further improve the system. A second version of the PIU now provides even better care for highly contagious patients, as well as for patients with immune deficiencies.

You talked earlier about combined flights, which implies a high availability of your fleet. How can you ensure this?

We are fortunate to have an in-house maintenance facility, which ensures that our aircraft are fully operational at all times. Another thing that has increased the availability of our crews is the acquisition of a new flight simulator for the Bombardier Challenger 650 in 2023. Rega can now train its crews in Zurich and no longer has to send them to Montreal. This frees up a lot of time for our crews. We are also making the remaining capacities of our simulator available to third parties through Lufthansa Aviation Training LAT.

What other competencies does Swiss Air-Ambulance have?

We have our own Design and Development Center, which enables us to make modifications to our aircraft for the benefit of our patients. The numerous regulations that have to be complied with present a major challenge for aircraft to be permitted to carry high-tech medical equipment, such as an ECMO machine, on board. For example, such a device and its fixtures must be able to withstand a g-force of up to 20. In order to be able to use high-tech medical equipment in its ambulance jets, Swiss Air-Ambulance benefits from the work of this in-house facility, which is accredited by the European Union Aviation Safety Agency, EASA, to approve and certify its own modifications.

What kind of special missions do you carry out?

Besides regular jet missions, which cover the entire medical spectrum, there are also particularly challenging missions in terms of material or patients: for example, we also fly missions with two premature babies in separate mobile incubators, severely unstable patients hooked up to a heart-lung machine, and patients with lung failure who are treated using fibreoptic bronchoscopy. In general, our special capabilities lie above all in the sphere of operationally challenging and very material-intensive flights. These complex missions require highly qualified personnel and high-performance equipment. I am extremely pleased that we are able to offer this to our patients.

I also remember one case where a family was repatriated after being attacked by an elephant in Thailand. We were delighted to be able to help these patients who had experienced such trauma.

What other improvements would you like to see within Swiss Air-Ambulance?

I would like to give our clients a better insight into our current and forthcoming missions. This should allow us to carry out more combined flights, thereby reducing costs and the environmental impact. Furthermore, in an increasingly unstable world, I want to maintain our operational capacity by anticipating and reacting to geopolitical events that affect international traffic.