Air rescuers are passionate about work despite the risks

When an air ambulance passes overhead, Jamie Kinder sends out "good thoughts and well wishes." She's thinking not just of the patient, so sick that speed is crucial, but of the crew, as well.

Kinder knows that emergency rescue can be dangerous. Ten years ago today, her dad, paramedic Tim Hynes, died along with pilot Stan Berg Jr. and nurse Shayne Carnahan as they were trying to ferry a badly injured skier to University Hospital in their AirMed helicopter. David Anderson had been caught in an avalanche that afternoon at Snowbird. He, too, died in the crash.

Reeling from the tragedy, AirMed began an intensive process of self-review to see if it was doing all it could to be safe. It had been 15 years and thousands of air rescues since Utah's only air ambulance disaster. AirMed pilot Louis Merz died in a crash in April 1983.

At its LDS Hospital headquarters, Life Flight, Intermountain Healthcare's air ambulance service, was looking at itself, too. AirMed and Life Flight are separate, but back each other up. When the AirMed helicopter went down in Little Cottonwood Canyon, the program's devastated staff suspended operations for a few days. Life Flight took up the slack. Later, AirMed would return the favor. The crews are often friends, always colleagues, the mutual respect constant. They share the same risks, braving altitude and weather because someone needs them.

For the two Utah programs, the decade that followed would bring policy changes, new safety procedures, better equipment and a strengthened resolve to put crew safety first. It would see new aircraft, new technology, new training programs. But it also would be punctuated by two more crashes, this time involving Life Flight — one a day shy of the fifth anniversary of the AirMed crash, on Jan. 10, 2003, and another the following June.

The January 2003 Life Flight crash of a helicopter near the Salt Lake airport, in thick fog, killed pilot Craig Bingham and paramedic Mario Guerrero. Miraculously, grievously injured flight nurse Stein Rosqvist survived. In June, a flight crew returning from rescuing a stranded hiker went down near Wasatch Boulevard when part of the tail rotor failed. Nurse Denise Ward and paramedic Brian Allred walked away with relatively minor injuries, a feat they credit to pilot Brent Cowley's skill. Cowley died.

The January 2003 crash was the first in which a crew member was lost during Life Flight's then-25-year history.

The wall in the AirMed command center is dominated by the portraits of Carnahan, Berg and Hynes, along with a photo of the helicopter that hit a mountain when it was caught in a storm. There are no captions — they know who the men are: much-loved reminders that life is precious and their task sometimes perilous.