Crews must be prepared to respond to scrambles as they occur, which may require the cancellation or rescheduling of previously scheduled flights. During a training exercise, the crew was called to a missing fishing boat. The deployment of the ICG and the powerful WESCAM MX-15 Imaging System ensured the boat was quickly found.
Small fleet availability
The combination of diverse tasks, a small fleet, the annual influx of visitors, and the lack of a forward base brings challenges. It takes over a flight-hour to reach the north side of the island from the base at Reykjavík Domestic Airport. The ICG has found a practical solution to this, Captain Sigurdarson said. “If we head out for an injured person further away, the Dash 8 Q300 flies to an airfield closest to the injured person. We provide the rescue, fly to the airfield, and the fixed-wing then flies the casualty back to the hospital in Reykjavík as soon as possible. This solution not only ensures that the victim receives medical help faster, but after refueling at the airport, we are also ready for a new assignment.”
Lárusson attributes the failure to disperse crews and aircraft across different locations on the island to a lack of funding. “Multiple forward stations is an expensive operation for a country with only 380,000 people. With the current setup, we have the whole operation in the same place and most of the
population lives in and around the capital area,” he explained. “The H225’s main gearbox also has a low-time precautionary scheduled maintenance schedule.
The main gearbox
maintenance schedule is not a limiting factor, but rather a lack of available technical manpower, lack of on-site spare parts, and longer delivering time of spare parts are limiting. Other operators in our area have stated they need a fleet of five or six helicopters to have two available constantly. The ICG scheduled maintenance program schedules one H225 for maintenance at a time, keeping two operational. For safety reasons, a second H225 must stand as a backup if a helicopter deployment is beyond 20 nautical miles. In doing so, we achieve an availability rate where 98-99% of the year we have one H225 available and 60% of the year we have two H225s at our disposal. With six crews – each consisting of a commander, copilot, rescue man with EMT-A, hoist operator with EMT-B and sometimes a flight physician from the state hospital – our goal is to have two crews and two helicopters readily available 24/7.” In this way, the ICG flew 314 rescue missions last year. In the first half of this year, 96 rescue missions were flown.
Lárusson: “We have six crews – each consisting of a commander, copilot, rescue man with EMT-A, hoist operator with EMT-B, and sometimes a flight physician from the state hospital.”
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