16.10.2023

Most routine transportation missions in the medical sector are conducted by ground transport. Ambulances have a level of priority that allows them increased efficiency in traffic and taxis are routinely used for transportation between hospitals. Emergency evacuations may be conducted by air.

Typically, evacuations from disaster areas (epidemics, natural events etc.) often call for the use of airplanes and helicopters are frequently used for mountain/remote terrain operations and urgent transportation. While airplanes operate on runway strips, necessary of consequent dimensions and almost systematically known in advance, helicopters can operate to or from areas that are more complex because unknown.

With the fast development of new capabilities, the Urban Air Mobility segment could offer to perform some missions more efficiently than current alternatives. Efficiency gains could be of time, societal or economic value. Most of those vehicles could have the capabilities to land or hover in the same manner as helicopters do yet offer some gains during the flight phase.

As with all processes, the modification of one step, here the shift from one mode of transportation to another, requires changes in the workflows, processes, trainings, and skills of the involved personnel. The objectives and success criteria of the project, whose results are shown in this document cover the entire value chain of the mission from the time the need is felt at a location to the time the need is fulfilled, and the situation is back to nominal.

Examples of such need are the low inventory of blood samples at a location that needs restocking, the emergency calls received from an operator because a person is having a heart attack in a location described over the phone or the need to relocate a human being, whether patient or doctor.

Without providing all details along the workflow, this document builds on the concept of operations defined in AiRMOUR deliverable 7.1 and leverage the findings along the project. Multiple metrics of different nature, ability to perform the mission, infrastructure, economics, environment, etc. have been formulated in D7.1 and measured in this D7.6 based on live validations, simulations and desktop research from several AiRMOUR countries.

Read the report here.