Imagine how your grandparents must have felt the first time they saw a microwave. Remember how you felt when you saw those SpaceX rockets landing, perfectly balanced on their ends? Watching this video might just make you feel old, like science fiction has become reality, and everything is just a bit new fangled and mind boggling.
We proved you can scale a Lake District Mountain (3100ft Helvellyn) in 3mins 30 seconds, despite very poor visibility that would have grounded a HEMS Helicopter. The Mountain Rescue foot response is over 70 minutes typically. The route was 1.2 miles and 2200ft of height gain. This is the latest in a series of Paramedic Response Exercises to prove capability in parallel with training up real Paramedics to provide first response Critical Care in hard to reach geographies. Cardiac, breathing or blood loss cases are time critical and require rapid stabilisation to buy time for evacuation. This system, akin to the rapid response of a Paramedic on a motorbike in an urban environment, will be the difference between life and death for many critical cases.
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Is this a totally amazing piece of technology that’s going to transform mountain rescue response times? Or is it inevitable that it’ll soon become an extreme sports hobby option that’s going to result in stranded jet-packers phoning for help as they’ve run out of gas far from home? Or both?
It’s already available as a pay to play ‘experience’, with prices starting at £2,000 plus VAT for a group session flying experience. Perhaps it’s the answer to those ‘It’s my big birthday, what shall I ask for’ Forum threads?
Reality?
