With their ability to reach areas that are otherwise inaccessible to wheeled vehicles, helicopters are being used more and more by fire, rescue and EMS agencies to rapidly transport emergency personnel and materials, sometimes over several hundred miles.

Perhaps the most common use of helicopters is the transport of critically sick or injured people to medical facilities. Sometimes a fire department operates this service, but in most cases it's provided by a regional authority or a private company operating in conjunction with one or more large hospitals.

For example, the Palm Beach County (Fla.) Health Care District, in conjunction with Palm Beach County Fire Rescue and two local trauma centers, operates two helicopters for emergency medical transport services throughout the county. In the St. Louis area, St. Louis Helicopter Airways, a private company, operates five medical transport helicopters in conjunction with three major hospitals as part of the Area Rescue Consortium of Hospitals.

A less common but more dramatic use of helicopters is in wildland fire suppression, where they can deliver up to 2,500 gallons of water, Class A foam or a water-retardant mixture in a single drop or in a series of controlled drops. Although helicopters have been used frequently in the western United States to attack fires directly or to coat and protect threatened exposures, they're also finding favor in other states.

As with emergency medical transport, some helicopters used in fire suppression are operated by fire departments, while others are operated by private companies on a contract basis.

For example, the Los Angeles County Fire Department is taking delivery of two new helicopters equipped with 1,000-gallon drop tanks. The tanks can be refilled in one minute through a retractable Snorkel while the helicopter hovers over a lake, reservoir or other static water source. Class A foam is injected from an onboard tank.

The LACFD also uses their fleet of helicopters during the wildfire off-season to transport the work crews who maintain the hundreds of miles of firebreaks, trails and access motorways in the mountains.

Rescue is another important use, as helicopters crop up at mountain, swift-water and high-angle incidents. In the Midwest, the Chicago Fire Department Air-Sea Rescue Unit uses two helicopters to transport their dive-rescue team to boating accidents on Lake Michigan. Many departments also use helicopters as aerial command posts or to map areas for fire pre-planning.

Even if your department doesn't operate a helicopter and probably never will, there may be opportunities to work with them. Public, private and military helicopters can be valuable resources for even the smallest fire department. They can transport victims from vehicle accidents, evacuate people stranded by floods, fight wildland fires threatening remote populated areas, or bring supplies and personnel to help local emergency responders.

Local fire departments need to know how to communicate with a helicopter while it's in flight, how to prepare landing zones and how to operate safely in the vicinity of a helicopter while it's on the ground. Many helicopter agencies provide training for local fire departments to ensure coordinated operations between personnel on the ground and those in the air.

Web resources

Aero Union
<www.aerounion.com>

American Eurocopter
<www.eurocopterusa.com>

Bell Helicopter Textron
<www.bellhelicopter.textron.com>

Erickson Air-Crane
<www.erickson-aircrane.com>

Helicopter Association International
<www.rotor.com>

HeliExpo
<www.heliexpo.com>

Sikorsky
<www.sikorsky.com>

In-service helicopters

Boston MedFlight
<www.bostonmedflight.org>

California Department of Forestry
<www.fire.ca.gov/fireemergencyresponse/avaition/aviation.asp>

Honolulu Fire Department
<www.honolulufire.org>

Collier County (Fla.) EMS Department
<www.co.collier.fl.us/ems/medflight.htm>

Helicopter Emergency Medical Service
<www.hems-london.org.uk>

Los Angeles City Fire Department
<www.lafd.org/airops.htm>

Los Angeles County Fire Department
<fire.co.la.ca.us/airops.htm>

Miami-Dade (Fla.) Fire Rescue
<www.co.miami-dade.fl.us/firerescue>

Orange County (Calif.) Fire Authority
<www.ocfa.org>

Orange County (Fla.) Fire-Rescue
<www.onetgov.net/dept/ocfrd/helicopter.htm>

Palm Beach County (Fla.) Fire Rescue
<www.pbcfr.org>

Powercor LifeFlight Community Rescue (Australia)
<lifeflight.org.au>

STATCARE Louisville (Ky.) Medical Center
<www.statcare.org>

St. Louis (Mo.) Helicopter Airways Inc.
<home.att.net/~stlhelo/ems.html>

Ventura County (Calif.) Fire Department
<www.ventura.org/fire>