CareFlite: Bell 429 Medical Interior Walkaround

Welcome to CareFlite. You're at the Fort Worth base -- a little bit about us: we started in 1979, and we've been blessed enough to have Bell start our whole journey with us. We started in the Bell 206L, and then we moved to the Bell 222, the Deuce, but I'm super excited to show you the 429 today. I started in the Bell 407, and I remember my first flight in the Bell 429 -- wow, what an experience that was. The first thing I'd like to point out is the large exterior doors, which is very important for our patient care -- it makes it a lot easier for us to climb in and out of the helicopter and move equipment around. One of the things I love about the Bell 429 is the amount of space we have in this thing -- the amount of headroom and the amount of space we have for the equipment itself and to work on the patient. It makes a huge difference in our patient care. We usually have the monitor up here, which stays in the mount -- we do take it out from time to time. We've got the jump bag, which has tons of equipment in it, suction, and the radios are easy to access right here. But I would say for me the biggest thing is having access to the lower half of the patient, because if we actually need to get there we can unbuckle, unbelt, move the seats, and climb back there. We normally keep two IV pumps on the wall, but we have a total of 12 in the aircraft for those super sick patients that end up having eight, ten, twelve infusions. So it's nice to be able to have all the space that we need. We keep our vent up here -- we have almost all the equipment that you would see in an emergency room, and we have enough room that we could put more if we needed to. The 429 is almost an empty canvas for medical personnel -- it starts as just a large open space, and one of the things that's really nice about it is everything is interchangeable. To set it up this way, we took one of the seats out, which took less than two minutes, and it's easy to put back in. You can move this bag forward, or take it out completely -- this seat moves forward, and you can take it out completely too. There are so many aspects to this that you could set it up any way you liked, and then somebody else could change it within a matter of moments. The 429 is kind of like a Swiss Army knife in a lot of ways. For instance, we do a lot of specialty calls -- scene calls in our facilities and things, but we also do ECMO calls out of here, which is heart and lung bypass. We do balloon pumps, which is a special machine for critically ill heart patients, same with the Impella, and these are all different sized pieces of equipment. We had specialty mounts made, so the ECMO machine would go here on the wall, but at a moment's notice we get the call to do the ECMO or the Impella or the balloon pump, and we're able to take the equipment that's already here, take it out, throw the brackets in, and go -- fast to move, fast to get in, even for patients. I'm talking about adults, but we do a lot of pediatrics, we do neonates -- they have a special piece of equipment for the NICU teams, which is an isolette that fits on top of the stretcher and sits in the back here, which helps keep the infant warm with oxygen and mixed air and things like that. So there are a lot of things we do specialty-wise that we're able to configure really fast. One of the other things I wanted to point out is we also carry a CPR device -- the ventilator and the CPR device are amazing, because we can free up our hands by putting the CPR device on the patient, and it does CPR for us. Now I have my hands free to do medication administration, talk on the radio, and do the critical care steps for the patient care flight. We have a motto: precious minutes count, and I know it's very important for us to use those minutes exactly how we see fit here. We carry about as much equipment as you would find in an emergency room. And one of the things that I love about being on the helicopter is because we're in Dallas-Fort Worth, we can go to a scene and fly directly back here -- speed is our friend, and we're not fighting traffic or anything like that. So for those precious moments, it really could make a difference -- five minutes, four minutes, three minutes could make the difference in whether the person lives or dies. So I think that's very important for our job. Let me show you how we load into the 429. Our 429 has the rear-loading clamshell doors -- it makes it easier for us to load heavier patients. One of the things for us is, when we land on scene calls, we want to stay running for speed, because speed is very important to the health of our patients. There is some concern that the tail rotor compared to where we're loading is so close -- we have safety guidelines, no one goes past that light, we always keep everybody safe, but it is a far enough distance that we don't worry about somebody getting hurt, and we do a lot of hot loads and unloads. The Bell 429 was designed to have the stretchers sit almost exactly level with the ground -- that way, when we're loading a heavier patient, it gives us access to move quickly, close the clamshell doors, and get out of here. So after we're done, we just close the clamshell doors -- we have safety latches for wind, so the wind from the helicopter doesn't close the doors on us, and it's super simple, super fast. Everything's flush and we're good to go. Thank you for coming out, appreciate you seeing our 429 -- we love this airframe, we've done a lot of good with it, saved a lot of lives.