Wings of Mercy

Wings of Mercy

The flying doctors look ahead

The Royal Flying Doctor Service of Australia is so much the stuff of legend nowadays that it has become one of the staples of Australian TV soap opera.

At least two TV series have been made about the RFDS – the first, over 30 years ago, featuring De Havilland Australia’s locally designed Drover as the doctors’ means of transport. The ‘star’ of Channel9 television offering ‘The Flying Doctors’ is a ruggedly handsome AS TA (formerly GAF) Nomad, callsign ‘Mike Sierra Foxtrot’, which earns its living carrying real patients and doctors as well as actors around New South Wales.

Today VH-MSF is the only Nomad left in an RFDS fleet which consists mainly of Piper Chieftains Cessna Conquests and Beechcraft Super King Airs. Of these, the most technically advanced in terms of its patient care facilities and the service it allows the RFDS to provide is the Super King Air B200C. A number of these roomy turboprop aircraft have now been heavily modified as ‘Retrieval Aircraft’ – in layman’s terms, flying intensive care units- and are probably the most advanced aeromedical aircraft in regular service anywhere in the world today.

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