Air Ambulance Service Takes Off

1/13/2005 Times Union
By: Dan Higgins

COLONIE – Some days, Chandler Atkins' plane ferries people with fabulous lives to the Hamptons for a weekend or to Boston for dinner.

Other clients are executives who need to get to, say, Elmira in a hurry.

But on Monday, half the seats in the Piper Cheyenne I turboprop were replaced with a custom-built stretcher. The passengers included a nurse, a respiratory therapist and a 6-year-old girl who needed to be evaluated for an organ transplant at Pittsburgh Children's Hospital, one of the best pediatric facilities in the world.

It's these air-ambulance trips that Atkins, president of Quik Flight LLC, feels best about.

"It really feels like a calling," he said. While the plane was just west of Scranton, Pa., Atkins monitored its progress on a computer screen that tracks the aircraft with a global positioning system in his office at Albany International Airport.

Quik Flight caters both to critically ill patients and to business and leisure travelers, and Atkins is looking for investors to help him expand the services. He wants to acquire at least two Lear Jets that can be switched quickly between charter and air-ambulance flights.

That wasn't part of the original business plan he and two partners hatched in 2002.

But, said Atkins, who teaches courses on entrepreneurship at Adirondack Community College in Queensbury, a business owner has to adapt to what the marketplace is calling for.

When the company moved from Warren County to the Schenectady County Airport in Glenville in 2003, Atkins learned that the last locally based air-ambulance service, Global Air Response, had left the market in 2001.

"There were no local, fixed-wing services," he said. The company applied and received permission from the Federal Aviation Administration to begin air-ambulance flights in 2004 from Albany International Airport.

Air ambulances like Quik Flight's are different from emergency helicopters because they tend to take patients on flights that are planned, even if they are planned on short notice.

Officials in the local health care industry like having access to a plane in Albany.

"Certainly this company's asset is that they are local, and we use them from time to time," said Greg McGarry, a spokesman for Albany Medical Center Hospital.

Albany Med uses its own Med-Flight helicopter to rush emergency cases – often from accident scenes – to the hospital.

But helicopters, with a shorter range, aren't practical for taking patients to hospitals in other states.

Air-ambulance service isn't cheap, though. While the costs can vary, services like Quik Flight's can cost $800 an hour.

But with a locally based operation, Atkins said he can undercut competitors by thousands of dollars.

"Because they have to send an empty plane here, and an empty plane back – people pay for that," he said.

Cost is an important factor to health insurance companies, many of which cover air-ambulance costs when they are deemed medically necessary.

Brian Butry, a spokesman for Capital District Physicians' Health Plan, said the Albany based health insurer has dealt with Quik Flight's air-ambulance service since its inception and is a fan.

"We love them," he said. "When someone really needs this service, it's usually a matter of life and death."