Medivac helicopter landing

I've been taking a WFR course (Wilderness First Responder) up in Donner pass with Bobbie Foster. We're about halfway through now.

Yesterday was our day off. As part of the day off Bobbie had organized with CareFlight to do a wilderness landing and chat with us for a while. Super cool!

Another member of our WFR class had some training in landing in helicopters, so she took did the comms stuff, double-checked the coordinates and that sort of thing. I brought my radio as a backup, so I was able to listen in. The day was perfect and the air was nearly still so there wasn't much radio chatter, just an initial call and response, then the copter landed.

I actually learned a *lot* from talking with them. Normally they'd be landing in a place they hadn't been before, but this same pilot landed here last year for this class - which meant he already knew the location. If he didn't then the point person for the landing would've been telling the pilot where the landing zone was relative to his position on a clock face once she caught site of the 'copter. This would help him find us. Then that point person would stand on the edge of the field, but visible in front of the heli as it came in, and give the pilot any additional info he asked for, things like wind speed and direction at ground level. They might also tell the pilot about potential hazards like a power-line near-by or a tree that's in the way, just to ensure the pilot is aware of them.

For snow landings, they actually like to land almost on-top of the point person. As they land that person will turn around and crouch, they'll land literally like 2 feet behind that person. This way as the snow shoots up all around the helicopter the pilot has something to focus on to keep the hover in the right spot as he lands, otherwise it's hard to stay steady apparently.

The pilot said that they can land in basically any 100ft x 100ft patch (he had more exact numbers, but it's not that important, point being if it's close to that big, he'll make it work). There needs to be level'ish ground, but he said he'd also landed in boulder fields before. So basically, don't second guess the pilot, they'll figure it out. They are largely limited by visibility, though temperature can also impact the lift the heli can generate. They actually mentioned that if you tell them the approximate weight of the patient, and temperature at your location it can help them gauge fuel appropriately, especially if it's high elevation, a hot day, and a heavy patient.

Interestingly, apparently they do fly at night with night-vision goggles. The team that landed consisted of a pilot, a nurse and paramedic. Apparently the nurse and paramedic actually also wear the night-vision goggles to help the pilot with difficult manuvers at night.

I didn't get good photos of the inside of the helicopter, but basically there's the pilot's seat, the two seats for the medical staff, and the stretcher for the patient. They have basically all the equipment an ICU would have, pumps for drugs, heart monitors, AED, the whole shebang. They've got survival kits in case they have to stay with a patient.

About half their missions are inter-hospital transports and half are scenes. Occasionally though they do things that aren't medical at all like transport SAR dog teams. Being located near Donner pass (we were a 6 minute flight) they obviously do a lot of ski-resort pickups, though the mentioned that a huge portion of their calls are snowmobiles in the winter, and ATVs in the summer - often involving alcohol.

Apparently 'copters that long-line are in a separate class from medivac 'copters like this one. A long-line is when they have a long cable strung under the helicopter that they lower down to the ground to lift loads (like a patient in a stretcher). This technique is only used when you can't get the patient to a reasonable landing zone. This 'copter then doesn't do that, they land and take the patient on board if they take the patient.

It's hard to imagine how sweet this sight would look if you've got a midline femur fracture or a nearly bursting appendix and are freezing in the snow 3 days skiing to the nearest road: More photos https://secure.flickr.com/photos/smalladventures/with/8791524799/

Nerdery: Tools for nomadic route planning

author: mbrewer (written a few weeks ago) I've been trying to figure out, as I travel around, how I can keep track of where my friends are so I can make sure to swing by and say hi when I'm in the neighbourhood. It turns out that figuring out what to do and where to go is a massive information organization problem. I've got schedules of classes from different sources, bits of data people tell me. Some cool things to do are periodic or seasonal, some are one time only, and some are static and mostly stay in place. Given those constraints figuring out where to go and what to do has been a surprisingly daunting task. It's like trying to solve travelling salesmen where things come and go, and each point is weighted and you can drop points, and you only have partial state. I'd be really surprised if a generalized version of "where do I go" isn't non-determinstic exponential.

But, I'm a computer scientist as well as hippie abo trail trash. And I can't just throw up my hands at an information organization problem. Jess actually first suggested the idea of building an app to do this. Before embarking on that though I started scanning around to see what's out there and get an idea what I *would* build if I built something.

I don't have a perfect solution, but I have some partial solutions interesting enough that I thought I'd share. What's below sounds trivial, but actually tracking it down is several evenings of legwork. Before going on I should note my assumptions as far as resources I have available for these needs.

• I have an android phone. I mostly use it off-line actually to save on phone bills, but for planning a road trip or what I'm up to next I figure coffee shops will work fine - or I can pay $2 and use the phone for the day (it's a tmobile prepay by the day plan, it's there a swear just hellishly hard to find).
• I currently track my contact list via Google contacts. It's generally pretty convenient and "good enough".
• Most people seem to put their address information on Facebook or at least their city, and very few put it in google+ or anything similar.
• I have a laptop as well.

Finding Friends

A while ago I found a cool app for android called "contact map". It's a Google map mashup and will display all your friends in a map of the world. You can zoom in and out and cool stuff like that.



This certainly doesn't have all the features I want, but it's a great start to experiment with and try and understand my use-case. There's just one flaw. I don't want to type in all my friend's addresses by hand, and what if they move! Keeping an address book is hard work, and like a good computer scientist I'm lazy.

Recently I got a facebook account again (I gave in, it's too useful). And today I found this application: http://www.friendstogmail.com/

Using friends to Gmail I generated a CSV file and imported it into Google contact. This is perfect since I didn't have to give my google credentials to the app, and I'm not concerned about the security of my facebook account. This solution is not perfect since it doesn't sync on an ongoing basis, but it means I can at least just repeat the process every so often (auto-merging contacts each time) to keep up to date on where my friends live.

So, the idea is now when I'm planning a trip and realize I'll be traveling through Vermont or Missouri I have an easy way to check who I should try to drag out on a backpacking trip, or who to bug for crash space :P.

It's an imperfect solution though, because most people don't put their address online at all. Of my over a hundred current contacts on facebook and several hundred Google contacts, I have something like 75 actual addresses :(. So, sadly, for now I'll have to continue curating my address list manually. It's a start though!

Scheduling and event tracking

I'm also using several Google calendars. One is a calendar of what I intend to do, one is a calendar of especially interesting events that Jess and I share, and one is the public calendar you see at www.smalladventures.net/mbrewer.

In addition to THOSE, Jess and I ALSO share a document of cool opportunities, people to learn from, somewhat static classes we'd like to take, and vaguer ideas for neat things to do.

conclusion

So, right now I have 3 sources of data I stare at to try and plan out what's going to happen. It's definitely ugly and offends my sensibilities as far as data organization goes, but you've got to start somewhere. I'm hoping as I come to understand the problem better I can refine this process a bit. Some randomness is fine, I'm not actually looking for the traveling salesmen solution alluded to earlier. I just want a good way to view all the data in a way that makes the good options obvious.

Newly on the road

I'm not feeling particularly technical right now, and I very much do feel like sharing this experience. So this will be a significantly less technical post than most of mine.

I'm currently sitting outside of a five guys on route 80 a bit south of Sacramento. I used to go to five-guys in college back in Pittsburgh, but it's been years since I've been to one, I didn't even know there were any out here. Seems fitting somehow, though I'm not sure why.

This morning after a shower I put the last of my belongings in the truck, emptied the trash, locked my apartment, and left the keys in my landlords mailbox. At work I gave a bottle of mead to some coworkers as a thank you and wrapped up a few tiny tasks. I ate lunch with a couple of coworkers where we chatted about random things like politics, war history, and told funny stories same as usual. After lunch and a quick "see you later", I went to a quick exit interview where we went over a bit of paperwork, and I was escorted out of the building.

So... here I am. My keyring has 2 keys on it - one for the truck and one for the truck's cap.

Emotionally today has been an interesting ride. Work was pretty relaxing, and surprisingly normal. As I walked out of the building though the whole thing definitely hit me. I'd just given up the two places I'd spent most of my time for the last couple of years. I drive to the mountains all the time, but driving out of Mountain View felt very different. I wasn't leaving home or anything, I don't really get attached to specific buildings and things in the same way many people do, but when I came back to mountin view I knew I'd be a visitor.

Thinking about it now I don't feel that way actually. When on the Appalachian trail previously I found that rather than no-where feeling like home everywhere did. I got attached to the forest itself, the rocks, the trees, the general feel of the place. I've lived in the bay area now, and the bay area will now be familiar only fading in familiarity as the place itself changes through time.

The weirdest part is the old "I forgot something" feeling. Occasionally I get a jolt "where's my work ID?" or similar. But I *can't* have forgotten anything because everything I have is in this car. I felt like this when I left for the airplane to fly to Georgia to hike the AT, but I'd completely forgotten how that felt until now.

I tried writing this post on my kindle, but it turns out my kindle can't load blogger for some reason. I can still use it, I'll just have to use the email gateway feature of blogger if I want to write posts that way. So, instead I'm currently writing this on my laptop which has a broken battery so it's running of the inverter powered by the truck. I definitely need to experiment more with options for blogging. I'm using vim and intend to post this sometime later.