Typical Ch9 rubbish
 

Quick, we need some vision of those P&o passengers:

http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/vide...622-4gw2a.html

Pity the plane hasn't left Queensland!

Yeh the 4 aircraft that flew VLI-BNE yesterday

were VH-CXJ,BLM,VPL,LJQ.

Thanks for the info LLoyd, it was a good opportunity to help publicise the work Careflight do given they are not a government agency nor fully funded by them.

The scenario certainly stretched resources given the aircraft involved, any more and I suspect the RAAF would have to been involved with a C17 airlift.

Mark - the money for the jets comes from insurance. These jets go and come from the islands all the time picking up sick people who have travel insurance.

Careflights jets aren't doing these runs for charity - it's a very 'for profit' part of their business.

Hi Radi

While it's true that they do come and go often (with 222 missions and 1508 hours flown across four company aircraft in 2015), it's not often you hear of such a big requirement being met by what is a charity run service, and should be publicised to give credit where credit is due. Insurance is no doubt the main customer, but I think you will find its not an exclusive one, as is the likely case with this incident.

Retrieval medicine is a good revenue stream for Careflight (and a somewhat logical one), the $7M profit it contributed last year to the Careflight group helped to cover some of the $19m cost of the community helicopter operations where no one is primarily picking up the bill, something that cannot be said for other commercial enterprises in this space.

Is the suggestion that Careflight run the community helicopters without government contracts/funding?

According to their 2015 annual report, careflight received $50.5 million in government funding in the 14/15 year.

Cheers

M

CareFlight NT operates almost (if not completely) exclusively on a government contract and is part of the same overall group.

There might be some slight confusion as the careflight queensland ops is quite separate to the other sections.

Both roughly receive 65-70% government funding.

Not at all, they receive contributions that fund partially the community helicopter operations, including straight out grants which represent 20% of their income to cover a portion of the op-ex needs.