County firm flies friendly skies for patients

CARIBOU – It has been another busy weekend for emergency medical flights from Aroostook County hospitals to central Maine medical facilities for Fresh Air LLC.

Three flights in three days included services for an accident victim, a cardiac patient, and a third patient whom doctors sent to Bangor.

Fresh Air has made 80 flights since Jan. 1, and has made as many as 150 flights a year since 2000.

“We are three part-time pilots, and one is always ready to go,” Bill Belanger, manager of the company, said Monday. “We have done this without one penny of state money.

“They just won’t give us any money,” he said. “The entire $3 million [in state funding] available this year has gone to LifeFlight Inc.,” the helicopter service based in Bangor.

Belanger admitted the helicopter service is needed, especially to take victims out of areas where emergency vehicles would have to drive long distances, such as in forestry accidents.

At times, Belanger gets frustrated because many people aren’t aware of his service, which flies most of the emergency patients out of Aroostook County from airports in Frenchville, Caribou, Presque Isle and Houlton.

“Most of the time we don’t even get credit for doing the flights,” he said. “When the LifeFlight helicopters do the service, they get credited by name, and most of the rest of the time the service is said to be an airlift.

“Air doesn’t lift anything,” he said facetiously. “Patients are flown, and most of the time by us.”

Fresh Air LLC is funded by fees collected for the flights. Patients pay the ambulance service that takes them to the airport, and the flight service is paid by the ambulance service.

Pilots are paid for their flight time.

An emergency flight from Caribou to Bangor costs about $4,000, according to Roy Woods, chief of the Caribou Fire and Ambulance Service.

Fresh Air LLC has one aircraft, a Cessna 414 with a place to put a stretcher. He said the service was even turned aside by the state when it asked for a more modern stretcher for the plane, at a cost of $40,000.

The pilots, who can fly through half-mile visibility and cloud cover, are hampered little by weather, he said. The flight from Caribou to Bangor is 40 minutes of flying time and about one hour and 10 minutes from hospital door to hospital door.

It takes about 90 minutes to get a LifeFlight helicopter to Aroostook County from central Maine, he said.

Fresh Air offers a plane and a pilot. Hospitals furnish a critical care nurse, and the ambulance services, with which they work, furnish critical care paramedics for the flights.

Along with Belanger, pilots Gene Lynch II of Presque Isle and Bob Besaw, a pilot for Fraser Papers Inc., are used as needed. Jim Vaughn keeps the plane in top shape at the service’s Caribou garage.

Lynch is involved in a welding supplies business, and Belanger owns and operates Optix, an optical retailer in Caribou.

“We all have other jobs, and we do this as it is needed,” he said. “We do this because the service was needed and to help out the communities we serve.

“Many doctors feel comfortable having this service available,” he said. “We service all hospitals in Aroostook County from their own airports.”

Medical flights are the only service provided by Fresh Air.

“We are always ready and available when needed,” Belanger said, sitting in the service’s waiting Monday morning. “We do 98 percent of the emergency medical flights out of Aroostook County.

“Nonemergency ambulance trips are done overland,” he said.

Nonemergency patients are taken by ambulance, where transports can take as long as four hours or more.