MAST offered the military a way of keeping its air crews trained while giving civilians a better chance of surviving serious accidents.
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The program was given trial runs at military installations near San Antonio, TX Colorado Springs, CO Seattle, WA Phoenix, Arizona and Mountain Home, ID. "It was the Vietnam evacuation platform located in the United States." "It was a helicopter manned by two pilots, a crew chief, and a medic in the back," said Lewis Barger of the Army Department Medical Museum. The program relied on a rescue format similar to the one used during Vietnam. MAST allowed military aviation units to help civilian communities with helicopter transport during emergencies. The Military Assistance to Safety and Traffic program, or MAST, was created in 1970 to mitigate the problem. In the 1960s traffic fatalities peaked at around 55,000 per year, far higher than today. This method was known as "scoop and go." It wasn't nearly sufficient to keep up with the carnage on the nation's highways at the time. "They're not carrying anything else except for minor bandaging to keep the blood out of their ambulance. "Two guys would get out, put you on a stretcher," he said. "The expectation when you called an ambulance in the 1960s was a Cadillac Hearse would show up," said George Wunderlich, a historian at the Army Medical Department Museum who also has experience as an EMS first responder and firefighter. The military had a network of combat medical centers, support hospitals, and even ships where patients could be flown.īack in the U.S., emergency response systems weren't nearly as sophisticated. In a long, narrow country where road networks were often dangerous, air evacuation was a lifesaver. I thought, 'I might have a record here,'" Eberwine said. "At one point in time I had 19 patients on board. Sometimes he and his crew would get so overwhelmed with casualties that they wouldn't even use the litters, or stretchers, onboard the helicopter. Jim Eberwine was a Dust Off pilot with the 82 nd Medical Detachment back in 1966. Such en route care was a change from previous wars, when helicopter fleets were mainly equipped to transport the wounded to medical facilities.
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American Homefront Jim Eberwine, a former Dustoff pilot, shows off a photo series he put together to commemorate the work of aviators injured in service of the U.S.