With South Australian origins, Flying Doctor part of the aeromedical base at Adelaide Airport from 2016
The Royal Flying Doctor Service aeromedical base at Adelaide Airport.
A $13 million aeromedical base at Adelaide Airport for the Royal Flying Doctor Service, including a new medical precinct where all members of retrieval services are based, has been built at Adelaide Airport.
The base included a six-aircraft hangar, an enhanced patient care area with private bays and a corporate office. It gave the Fying Doctor greater access and space for storage and maintenance and improve response times.
The South Australian Ambulance Service’s Medstar team now share the same precinct at Adelaide Airport. This move saves seven to nine minutes of travel time for medical teams.
The Adelaide base and its pilots and flight nurses provide 24-hour emergency retrievals and inter-hospital transfers, serving all regions of South Australia, as well as the Sunraysia region of Victoria. The Adelaide base is also home to the engineering team doing heavy maintenance for the aircraft fleet situated across South Australia. The Flying Doctor has another aeromedical base at Port Augusta.
Flying Doctor capability in South Australia has been boosted by being able to call on the Medi-Jet 24 – the ultimate intensive care unit in the sky – based in the Northern Territory since 2019.
South Australia has close links with the start of the Fying Doctor service.
In 1911, the Rev John Flynn arrived at the tiny Smith of Dunesk Mission at Beltana, 500km north of Adelaide, Here he saw the rigours of outback life and realised there was no medical care for inland residents and travellers.
South Australian Alfred Traeger helped overcome the communication hurdle that held back Flynn’s vision for the flying doctor service. Traeger invented a pedal-operated generator to power a radio receiver. By 1929, people in isolated area were able to call on the flying factor to assist them in an emergency.
Flynn also received major help from Adelaide’s Adelaide Miethke, who came up with the idea for the flying doctor offshoot, the School of the Air, established in Alice Springs in 1951.
