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JRTC offers unique training for AE Airmen

  • Published
  • By Capt. Joe Knable
  • 19th Airlift Wing Public Affairs
LITTLE ROCK AIR FORCE BASE, Ark. --  They can be alerted at any hour to arrive on base for hours of mission planning and preflight briefings. They must maintain flying currency requirements and pass routine check-rides. They're away from their families several weeks each year flying missions all over the world.

They aren't pilots, navigators, or loadmasters. They are Air Force aeromedical evacuation flight nurses and technicians, and they're saving lives around the world every day.  To be ready, they train during such events as the Joint Readiness Training Center, or JRTC, Exercise 09-09.

Aeromedical evacuation, or AE, crews from Pope AFB, N.C., MacDill AFB, Fla., Lackland AFB, Texas, and March Air Reserve Base, Calif., are participating in the JRTC exercise from Little Rock AFB.  The JRTC exercise is based at Fort Polk, La., which is simultaneously training 3,200 Soldiers "deployed" to an austere environment at Fort Polk.

The training AE crewmembers receive at JRTC is unique. JRTC is the only place where crewmembers get to utilize all of the AE unit type codes, or elements, together in one place, said Col. Tami Rougeau, senior Air Force AE trainer and mentor at Little Rock AFB.

AE includes several career fields in addition to the flight nurses and technicians: medical service corps officers, enlisted administrative personnel, communications officers, radio operators, logisticians, aerospace ground equipment personnel, and flight records maintenance personnel. All of these pieces of the AE puzzle come together at JRTC.

Training missions at JRTC mirror the sequence of real-world AE missions, said Capt. Nathan Ferguson, a medical crew director and flight nurse from the 43rd AE Squadron at Pope AFB, N.C. The crewmembers are alerted approximately four hours before the flight's scheduled take-off time. They must arrive within an hour for standard paperwork and preflight briefings from the medical crew director and aircraft commander. Crews also receive an intelligence briefing.

JRTC missions use a standard crew, made up of five people -- two flight nurses and three technicians. Crews always prepare for the most difficult patient load and configuration for each mission.

The length of the missions vary, but they include going to pick up patients from a Mobile Aeromedical Staging Facility, where wounded patients are kept stabilized; loading them onto the aircraft, monitoring them during the flight, and delivering the patients to a higher level of care.

AE Airmen rarely stabilize the patients. AE's purpose is to transfer battle and non-battle injury patients from one area to another, said Lt. Col. Kim Devoto, director of operations, 459th AES, Andrews AFB, Md.

Approximately 80 percent of patients they transfer from Germany to Andrews AFB, Md., have non-battle injuries, such as sports injuries or serious illnesses, he said.

AE Airmen also work with AE Soldiers aboard Army helicopters to get wounded service members from the battlefield to a combat support hospital in theater where the patients are stabilized before being transferred to larger hospitals with more capabilities.

After the aircrew members unload their patients, they discuss what they did well and what they could have done better. The medical crew director then calls higher headquarters with a report. When the work is done, the crew goes back on 12 hours of crew rest so they can be ready when the next call comes in.

AE is making a significant difference in the current operations.

"Patients are moved from the battleground where they were injured to a world-class hospital in the U.S. usually within three days or less," said Colonel Devoto.

With the help of AE, a service member's chance of surviving a battle injury today is better than 95 percent.  The AE airmen at JRTC speak very well of their career field.

Captain Furguson said he became a flight nurse because it's the "best nursing job in the Air Force." 

"Our unit has been involved in everything since Korea, including Grenada, Somalia, and the California wildfires," Captain Ferguson said. He remembers his most exciting mission as one where they picked up an injured Marine in Balad Air Base, Iraq, and took him straight to San Antonio with air refueling -- a 17-hour flight -- for urgent eye surgery.

"There isn't one best day in AE," said Colonel Rougeau. "We have the best job in the Air Force in aerovac. Every day you get up and you know you contributed to saving a life somewhere."