HALO Air Ambulance may need new heli for hospital landings, CEO says

While HALO’s new flagship helicopter unveiled in February has enough power to qualify most of the time to land at the hospital, there will be certain hot days where it won’t be able to.

“Every minute matters and so we do want to be able to land at the hospital 365 days a year and there’s only one way to do that,” Carolan told CHAT News at HALO’s annual general meeting Thursday evening.

“Finding a way to get there will be important in the future for sure.”

HALO did try to convince the province and the federal transportation agency to reverse their decision but the organization hasn’t had success so far, according to Carolan.

Paul Carolan says HALO Air Ambulance needs to start considering a new helicopter. Eli J. Ridder/CHAT News

When it can’t land directly at the hospital, patients are transferred from the helicopter to an ambulance for a drive to the emergency department that can take up to 12 minutes.

“That matters, every minute matters,” said Carolan.

Tricia Nardari, a member of HALO’s board, said acquiring an aircraft that can qualify for the hospital’s helipad requirements would improve the service.

“Because how do you book your accident, how do you book your incident on a time when you know that the helicopter’s going to meet the land criteria? You can’t,” Nardari said.

“We want to make that coverage as universal as we can.”

The HALO organization also wants to make another upgrade: a new unified facility. Carolan said the aim is to have the new space in three to five years.

“But there’s some big decisions that have to happen in order to get things rolling on that,” Carolan said.

The City of Medicine Hat could be a partner in that by helping to find a site or providing a discount, the chief executive said.

However, he noted the city’s reluctance to financially support HALO.

The city provided HALO with $500,000 in both 2023 and 2024 in operating cash, joining several other municipal partners in the region.

However, council last year voted to defer HALO’s request for $250,000 in both 2025 and 2026 in favour of waiting for a formal grant application process to make a final decision.

Council, with some hesitancy, directed staff to look into creating such an operating grant request process, work that is currently ongoing.

Carolan at Thursday’s AGM said HALO has seen an uptick in calls for the city and the organization is “working to get the city back on board.”

“Medicine Hat as a municipality needs to play a role,” he told those gathered at the Veiner Centre.

“Just because their people live in the city and we’re not going to land in this park back here, doesn’t mean people stay here all the time.”

HALO has several other municipal and corporate partners — as well as public support from the communities it serves — that its financial health is strong, officials said.

The ability for HALO’s leadership to even start planning for the future is indicative of how far its come from its early days as a scrappy collective with a shoestring budget, Nardari pointed out.

“It’s really a challenge to stay motivated, keep coming back and doing what we’re doing when we know we’re always fighting an uphill battle,” she said.

“So, now that we’ve reached the point where we have some financial stability — there’s money in the bank — we can look ahead. And not always at just the month ahead, but years ahead…and that’s a pretty significant program advancement.”

HALO in 2024 diversified the types of missions it carried out through various pilot projects and new partnerships that saw its service used to support fire and police — while still prioritizing emergency medical responses.

Fire rescue made up two per cent of HALO’s missions in 2022, five per cent in 2023 and 15 per cent in 2024, according to statistics included in the AGM package.

Law enforcement, a whole new category included last year, made up of 13 per cent of HALO outings.

Search and rescue remained at five per cent for the last three years and inter-facility transfers saw a slight decline year-over-year.

On-scene emergency responses, the reason for HALO’s existence, still make up a strong majority of all HALO missions, the data showed.

Carolan said the increase in mission diversity is a positive for the pilot crews.

“One of the most challenging and fatiguing things for them is they have to be at the airport. They have to be at the hangar. They have to be ready to go whenever a call comes in,” he said.

“And so being able to take missions and support the community absolutely helps them and provides a level of satisfaction and contribution to them.”

HALO’s next major public event is taking place in June.

The Grant Fletcher HALO in the Hanger is an annual open house featuring the HALO-1 helicopter, partners, sponsors, donors and the organization’s staff.

by Eli J. Ridder

HALO Air Ambulance may need new heli for hospital landings, CEO says

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