Kerr J1
1Flight Structures
Biography:
Jon Kerr is Founder, CEO and Chief Designer of Flight Structures Ltd.
He has over 30 years in the aircraft industry and lists his engineering specialties as design and certification of FAR 23 aircraft, helicopter emergency medical services equipment, powerplant installations, agricultural aircraft, and more recently, automated flight.
The opportunity for an operator to develop from scratch the EMS configuration for a helicopter does not come around often. Flight Structures Limited (FSL), a Civil Aviation Authority of New Zealand certified aircraft design and certification organisation, were thrilled to be awarded the contract to fit out two new helicopters for Northern Rescue. FSL were equally thrilled to learn that the configuration design would be by Northern Rescue medical crew, predominantly their paramedics.
This presentation summarises the design and development of Northern Rescue HEMS configuration for two new AW169 helicopters. The design brief was to accommodate pre hospital, inter hospital, and search and rescue missions with minimal configuration change.
The helicopter cabin is a limited three dimension space that accommodates medical crew, patients, seats, stretcher, medical equipment, and medical bags. The EMS cabin must meet aircraft certification requirements for occupant safety, retention of items of mass, evacuation paths, flight crew communication, and emergency landing provisions. The environment is dynamic with movement of people and equipment for loading and unloading of stretchers, hoist operations, access to medical supplies, monitoring and at times performing procedures on patients, and do all of this wearing night vision googles.
Paramedics are good at saving lives and very good at travelling in Helicopters, but are they good design engineers? Do they know better than doctors? Do they know better than pilots? What does the result look like? What did the CEO think? What were they thinking?