By Tony Lystra
The Daily News
PORTLAND, Ore. — Just after 9:30 a.m. Friday, Andre McGann spun up the blades of a blue helicopter perched atop the parking garage at St. John Medical Center. The chopper rose steadily above a concrete pad, pitched forward and leaped off the building’s edge, swooping over Lake Sacajawea, and heading northwest, along the Columbia River.
McGann, a 42-year-old pilot for the Life Flight air ambulance company stationed in Longview, was accompanied by a nurse and a paramedic, who would help him move a patient from Columbia Memorial Hospital in Astoria to Oregon Health and Science University in Portland.
There is probably no faster way to get a human being from one hospital to another — or from an accident scene to an emergency room — than by helicopter.
Full story: Helicopter called ‘godsend’ for those in rural communities