Episode 7 Helicopter Heroes

When you're with someone critically ill or seriously injured,

every minute you wait for medical aid to arrive can feel like an hour,

which is why a helicopter like this can be one of the most beautiful sights in the world.

It certainly was for me when I was a copper. This is the Yorkshire air ambulance

and their business is saving lives.

From the Dales to the big cities of Leeds and Sheffield,

patients in the UK's biggest county are never more than 10 minutes from a hospital,

thanks to this 150-mile-an-hour life-saver.

And every day brings a new life-or-death emergency for its team of flying paramedics.

Two helicopters, four paramedics, 5 million patients.

Today - a workman's leg is crushed by a mobile crane...

We've given him some pain relief. It's quite badly crushed.

..but bad weather could ground his flight to hospital.

There's a race to save a biker badly hurt in a crash that killed his friend.

-Were you wearing a helmet and all that?

-Yeah.

A patient comes back to thank his rescuers...all of them.

It was very, very, very emotional.

Where are we going to go from here?

And a flying doctor comes down to earth for a night shift on the streets of Leeds.

When travelling at 150 miles an hour, even an outsized county

like Yorkshire shrinks to a more manageable size.

Cutting out the country lanes sometimes means a half-hour drive

can be a five-minute flight.

But out towards the east coast,

you can be in for a long wait for help, even from the air.

On a remote farm on the edge of the North York Moors, there's been an accident.

This crane weighs 7.5 tonnes

and it's run over drainage- contractor Darren Patterson's leg.

It's badly broken.

Helimed 99 is on the case.

Paramedic Pat has seen accidents like this before.

If he is as serious as it sounded

from the caller, then this gentleman

will need to be in to James Cook hospital

as quickly as possible.

It depends on whereabouts on his leg it is -

if it's the lower leg or upper leg.

If it's on the femur, he can basically bleed to death,

if it's crushed and has damaged arteries and veins in his leg.

So it's a potential life-threatening injury.

Darren's workmates have been waiting 20 minutes for help to arrive.

He was walking alongside the crane

when one of its caterpillar tracks crushed his leg.

It looks like there's someone by the front wheels of that tractor.

MUFFLED SPEECH

Darren was completing the last job

on the final day of a two-week contract when the accident happened.

Now all he wants is pain relief.

My leg is completely crushed.

Below the knee it's completely crushed.

Right, which...

So the track has actually gone over.

Yeah, right up to the knee there. It's all right above the knee.

All right above the knee?

Yeah. It's all right above that. But it's crushed there.

Can I have a quick look at it, Daz?

Honestly, cut the BLEEP jeans, because it...

No, I'll cut the jeans, you're all right.

Every time I move it's BLEEP and I don't want to see anything.

The ground crew have driven 20 miles

and walked half a mile to reach the accident scene.

What I'm going to do is give you some painkiller, and that will help straight away.

Pat is carefully assessing whether the weight of the crane

has crushed the blood vessels supplying Darren's foot.

If it has, he could lose his lower leg.

He's in a lot of pain. She's giving him a little bit of pain relief

before we can put a splint in the leg.

It's quite badly crushed.

Sharp scratch coming up in a sec.

-I feel tired.

-You feel tired, mate. Yeah, it's your body just going hey!

But keep still for me.

The good news is, Pat thinks he can detect a weak pulse in Darren's foot.

-I feel like I'm going to pass out.

-All right, Daz, just keep going.

What we need to do is make sure you're safe first.

Can I confirm again, you've not hurt yourself anywhere else?

-No.

-It was just the track that went over your leg.

Are you getting a bit cold now, as well?

-I've been cold for yonks. Shivering like BLEEP.

-All right.

HE MOANS

Darren's language is a little colourful, perhaps understandably.

Ohh! BLEEP! BLEEP!

What he doesn't realise is that paramedic Sammy Wills

doesn't approve of many of his favourite words.

and often tells off her colleagues if they use them.

BLEEP!

As we approached the gentleman,

I could hear him before I could see him.

He was in a lot of pain and verbalising that quite remarkably,

letting me know

how much it hurt him.

Oh, BLEEP! BLEEP!

I personally choose not to use foul language. He chose to swear

and I believe it was helping him vent his pain at that time.

I chose to blinker it out.

I heard the words that it hurts and where it hurts.

You've got enough morphine now to knock an elephant out.

Darren's now been given as many painkillers

as the paramedics dare dispense. But he's still in severe pain.

And it's not helping his temper. The workmate who was driving the crane

is in big trouble with Helimed 99's patient.

I tell you what, I wish I could get up because I'd BLEEP kick you up the BLEEP!

There are no hard feelings though.

Darren needs his workmates to help him carry him to the helicopter.

It could be worse. The nearest road is half a mile away.

Pat knows Darren's leg needs urgent hospital treatment

followed by emergency surgery at James Cook Hospital in Middlesbrough.

But that's at least an hour away by road.

And the weather is about to take a turn for the worse.

We've bad weather coming in from the north.

If we have difficulty, we'll turn around and go to Scarborough, all right?

-They can't confirm yet.

-We can't confirm,

We're going to try for Middlesbrough.

Coming up: their patient turns out to be terrified of flying.

The crew face a battle with nature to get him to hospital.

Well, we can't go that way.

An accident victim is reunited with the watch he lost in a head-on smash.

I can't thank you enough, honestly.

And flying-doctor Andy is caught up in a murder investigation.

Potentially very serious, if not fatally injured.

The flying paramedics can fly up to 12 missions a day,

but some cases will stay in their memories for ever,

often, for the wrong reasons.

Kyle Turner's mum knew he was born to ride a motorbike.

He got one of those battery-powered motorbikes when he was one.

At four, he got a real motorbike.

He knew every part that a motorbike had and he just lived for motorbikes.

But one summer's day, Kyle's love for speed resulted in a freak accident.

He collided head-on with biking friend Scott Moffat,

while trail riding near his home.

Within minutes of the crash, Helimed99 dispatcher Chris Solomons is scrambling the chopper.

It's 40 miles to the former colliery where the accident's happened.

Even at 160 miles an hour, that's 15 minutes.

The news from the scene of the accident isn't good.

'One casualty on scene - left arm fractured.

'Left leg fractured. One DOA on the scene. I repeat, one DOA.'

Roger, thanks for that. It's received, thanks.

In this former mining community,

everyone knows there has been a major accident,

including Kyle's mother.

I'd seen all the fire engines, the ambulances,

and they were just at the bottom of the street.

My little girl, Paris, she went running down to the bottom

of the street and she just came back and she was screaming at me.

I couldn't make her out.

She said, "He's at an accident on his bike, it's Kyle!"

As I got halfway down the street, I saw the air ambulance above.

I just stood there and I screamed. I just knew.

I had seen my husband's best friend coming towards me...

..and I just knew by his face.

And I just kept saying to him, just smile, smile for me.

He kept shaking his head and I knew then,

before he had even got up there that he was gone.

Helimed 99 is too late to save Kyle, but the battle is on

to get his friend Scott to hospital.

Leg fractures can be fatal and he could have a collapsed lung.

-We've one DOA over there.

-OK.

This one has got a fractured leg.

OK. Were he helmeted at all?

Were he helmeted at all?

-I think so.

-Yeah?

We can see helmets around.

Scott? Were you wearing a helmet and all that?

-Yeah.

-OK.

The accident's happened in a remote area of wasteland.

The ground paramedics had to hitch a lift on an off-road bike to get here.

Helimed 99 is Scott's only hope of a rapid journey to hospital.

Anybody witness what happened?

I weren't on the scene. There were bikes going round and they just stopped

so we thought something had happened so we came rushing over.

-Just going to cut your top, mate.

-Is he going to be all right?

Scott's girlfriend, Laura, has also heard about the accident and come running.

-Laura!

-All right, I'm here.

-Her boyfriend is in severe pain.

-Ow!

-That hurts?

-Ow, it hurts, Owww!

-Sorry, sorry.

-Oww.

HE GROANS

Flying-Doctor Andy has his work cut out.

Scott is in such agony he's going to give him ketamine - a powerful painkiller.

Please darling, they're making you better.

-Leave it there.

-Come on, you'll be all right.

-I'm worried about his chest.

Scott needs urgent hospital treatment,

but if he has a collapsed lung, his condition could deteriorate

rapidly in the air.

Dr Andy has to be sure it's safe to fly him.

I'm just exposing this right leg

because I think it is going to be easier for us to manoeuvre him about with his trousers off.

Scott, open your eyes.

That's fine, the ketamine's just knocked him out a little bit.

The Helimed crew have to balance the need for speed

with making sure their patients are in a fit state to fly.

And Scott's not there yet.

Coming up, Dr Andy decides to make a move

and police investigate the accident.

His oxygen levels are OK at the moment so we're happy with that.

Freak weather forces Helimed 99 out to sea.

I only had to look out to the left and it was total sea.

And flying-doctor Andy is called in to help an ambulance crew in trouble.

When the Helimed team leave their patients at the hospital door,

they often lose touch with the people whose lives they have saved.

But sometimes there's a reunion.

At Helimed 99's hangar at Leeds Bradford Airport,

they're getting prepared for a special visitor.

Billy is a former patient of ours.

He was involved in a bad car smash just over the road from the airport.

Unusually for him, the fire crew that cut him out

are his colleagues, he used to be a fireman.

The surprise for him today is he is coming up to the airbase to visit. What he doesn't know is

the big surprise, his colleagues, the fire crew will be here today.

Billy is on his way,

unaware of the surprise that lies ahead.

I've been in helicopters.

I was with the air sea rescue,

I did a bit of time with them when I was with the fire brigade.

I've been in a helicopter.

To be honest, I didn't know it was here, I thought it was further up!

Sammy remembers the day Billy had his crash well.

Billy's accident sticks in my memory, not only because it was over the road from the air base

but there were two casualties, both of them warranted the air ambulance.

It was a hard decision, whether we were going to fly

Billy or the other gentlemen who had a massive head injury.

We were having to breathe for him as well.

Unfortunately Billy was trapped in the car. It was his colleagues,

the firemen, that were cutting him out at the time as we left.

I said to a colleague, "It's Billy."

When it is one of your colleagues or your friend or family it's even more traumatic.

It'll be really good to see Billy. I'm looking forward to meeting him.

Even as he arrives and sees a familiar fire engine on the helipad,

Billy doesn't suspect a thing.

There was a fire engine at my old pump like that.

Hello, Billy!

Hiya! How are you doing, mate?

-I am fine, thank you.

-Nice to see you. Come on in.

-Thank you.

As the paramedic greets Billy at Air Ambulance Headquarters front door,

the fire crews go through the hangar doors at the back.

-Can you fit through?

-Yeah.

-Good lad.

You are behind the scenes here.

Finally, Billy realises he's been set up.

I ain't going out there!

'I thought, oh no, what is this about?

'How am I going to react to this?'

-Haven't seen you for

-BLEEP

-ages!

'They were saying, "I haven't seen you for ages, how are you getting on?"'

There was tears in my eyes.

It was very, very, very emotional.

Did they give you cushions to put up your jumper?! How are you?

He has nothing but praise for his old fire crew colleagues

who had to cut him out of his wrecked car.

'In the time I was in the fire brigade all those years,

'I've never been to one where I knew the person in the car.'

Good to see you! God, it must be years!

I recognised you straight away with this.

It is OK going to an accident or a fire and looking after someone

and caring, they do care, they care an awful lot.

But there is no knowing them, is there?

And suddenly you know someone who is in there.

'I don't know how I would feel if I opened a car door and saw

'a friend of mine in there or a relative, I really don't know.'

Local farmer, John Penny, witnessed the crash.

I looked round, opened my door and heard the almighty bang.

Over my right shoulder behind me, I could see the cars just...

meet up and go up, like two horses rearing up, and drop back down.

I got my foot on the handle of the door and pulled the door open.

All I could think of all the time was the cars were going to explode.

As I pulled the door open, obviously,

Billy was there, I seen blood and things, you know.

I didn't know what to do. All I could think was, the car is smoking, it's going to set on fire.

I got on the phone, dialled 999 and they were asking me questions.

"Don't ask me questions, just get the people here.

"Get whoever, ambulances, police, fire brigade, that's what you need.

"And get them here quick!"

It will stay with me for the rest of my life.

Several weeks after the accident,

he found something at the scene that he thinks Billy might want back.

Do you remember John?

This is the farmer.

I do thank you. I can't thank you enough, honestly.

When you got off the phone, I was sat...

'I wanted to make sure he got it back.

'Obviously, today is the day I gave him it back, his watch.'

The fire brigade had not bothered about the watch, cut it off and thrown it away.

So he said, "I've brought you it." It was only a working watch

but he said it might have been sentimental

and that set me off again. That was a tearful afternoon!

Nice smile. Lovely.

It was a terrible accident that Billy was involved in.

It did turn his life upside down, but it was fantastic

to see the look on his face when he saw his old fire crew.

I think Billy has made a great recovery.

It is down to his attitude. He was determined to get well despite everything that happened.

I now treat every day

as the last day, as if there's...

make the best of every day, never be boring.

If being miserable was going to get me better quicker,

I would be the most miserable guy in the world.

It doesn't, does it?

There's no point, is there?

I take my hat off to them. To do it not in a hospital but out there in the field.

They do it at the side of a road, or in a field or wherever,

and I do, I take my hat off to them. All of them.

Coming up, there's a life-saving flight for a badly injured biker.

His airway is good, breathing is OK and keeping on top of everything.

And it's the weekend, and flying doctor Andy

is treating the casualties of a night on the town.

We treat him as though he has a neck injury.

Air ambulances don't have blue lights and two-tones,

but get top priority from the air controllers who police the skies.

Sometimes they need it.

Darren Patterson was lucky to survive

when a 7.5 tonne crane drove over his leg

on a remote farm on the edge of the North York Moors.

His leg is badly crushed and there are fears he might lose it.

Paramedics Pat and Sammy are trying to get him to hospital

as quickly as possible but there is a problem.

We are going to try James Cook, but the weather is closing in from the north.

Steve is going to set off and try and head towards James Cook.

If we have to redivert,

we will get in touch via the sat phone and redivert to Scarborough.

To add to the weather worries,

their passenger is terrified of flying.

I can't believe you've got me in an aeroplane and I can't see!

My wife has been trying to get me to go on holiday for five years!

If Darren could see out of the window, he'd be even more nervous.

To reach the hospital in Middlesbrough, Helimed 99

must cross the Cleveland Hills and much of the area is in low cloud.

Soon, they are flying into a hailstorm.

Well, we can't go that way.

-Scarborough and Middlesbrough are both exactly the same distance.

-Can they handle something like this?

Yes, I suspect so.

They'll be able to manage the trauma, yeah.

Pilot Steve Cobb must stay in sight of the ground to navigate, but the weather's getting worse.

It was snow and hailstone quite badly, and I could see it flashing

past the aircraft. And I'm trying to calm the patient down,

and allay his fears about flying,

and I was thinking, "This isn't good."

It got to the point where I think at one point, Sammy says...

asks if it would be a good idea to put the aircraft down

and call for land ambulance to come and take the patient off us and convey the patient.

But the crew know Darren needs emergency surgery.

He hasn't got the time to go by road.

Steve turns back the way he came and decides to head south to Scarborough instead.

The only sure way to find their destination is by flying over the sea and following the coast.

We've had to redivert. We originally wanted to go to James Cook Hospital in Middlesbrough

with this gentleman, but due to the weather

and the weather closing in on top of us on the Moors,

we've had to come onto the coast

and travel down south along the coast to Scarborough.

So we'll try to avoid all the bad weather,

these April showers, these hailstones.

We were flying, literally, with the cliffs on our right-hand side,

and we use that as our reference, visual reference point.

I only had to look out to the left, and it was total sea.

Pat was once a rating in the Navy, but Sammy doesn't like the sea.

The whole team remember her fear of the dunker,

a simulator which recreates a crash landing on water.

Now she's flying over the cold North Sea for real.

I have done my dunk tank training, I wasn't anxious about that.

The fear was, how would I then get this patient out

if we were to go in the sea?

But they've made it.

Half an hour after taking off, Helimed 99 arrives in Scarborough.

It's a moment of relief for everyone on board.

-Well done, Daz!

-You've lapped it, Daz!

-What a flight for a first flight!

-I know!

Darren is within minutes of specialist care, but he's a worried man.

You'll even fly your wife to Majorca?

-Looks like it could be on one leg, now, don't it?

-No! Don't worry about that, Daz.

You're gonna be fine.

Coming up... Will Darren lose his leg, as he fears?

We don't know how shattered it is.

Or will surgeons be able to repair the damage done by seven and a half tonnes of crane?

And flying doctor Andy is called to a pedestrian knocked down in the city centre.

We have to treat him as though he's got a neck or a back injury.

Let's catch up on that rescue operation that's taken the crew

of Helimed 99 30 miles from base - and the paramedics are worried.

On a disused coal tip in South Yorkshire,

the paramedics are fighting to save the only survivor

of a head-on crash between two off-road motorbikes.

Biker Carl Turner died in the impact, but his friend Scott Moffatt

has sustained a broken arm and leg, a collapsed lung,

and he could have a head injury.

Flying doctor Andy Pountney has been working to stabilise Scott

for a life-saving flight to hospital.

Hopefully we've got the pain under control.

Keeping an eye on his chest.

His oxygen levels are OK at the moment, so happy with that.

Taking him to Pinderfields,

which is the quickest A&E department for us to get him into.

At last, Scott's ready for take-off.

The scene of the accident is a huge area of waste land.

It's in remote areas like this that Helimed 99 comes into its own.

Land ambulances simply couldn't make it here.

Biking here is illegal, but it's been going on for 20 years.

All the crew of Helimed 99 know

is the crash had devastating medical consequences for their patient.

So how did the other guy die?

I don't really understand what's...

We can't get any...

Seem to get any... Nobody's seen it happen.

-I'm all clear. I've told the coppers we're taking off.

-We're clear rear right.

Scott's condition is carefully monitored throughout the flight.

Just looking for any adverse observations en route,

and just keeping an eye on him.

His airway's good, breathing is OK,

and just keeping on top of everything.

Just to make sure that things are all right

when we arrive at the hospital,

and we can get him in the ambulance safely and down to casualty.

Scott was in hospital at Wakefield within 10 minutes.

Despite the severity of his injuries, he made a good recovery.

He still finds it difficult to speak about the accident that killed one of his best friends.

Back home near Doncaster, Carl's mother Michelle, girlfriend Emma

and their two children have only memories of a bike-mad son, partner and dad.

He just lived his life at top speed,

and he just wanted to cram everything in.

Everything he did,

I think,

he just... I suppose he knew... I suppose...

He would live a short life.

An inquest revealed that neither rider

could have seen the other as they approached a blind bend in opposite directions.

And, crucially, Carl wasn't wearing a helmet.

You know, I think, parents, if kids have got bikes,

to make sure they do wear proper head gear and body armour.

It can save their lives.

Despite the tragic outcome of the accident, Carl's mum

is thankful for the paramedics who raced to save both riders.

I think it is really important,

you know, the job that they do,

obviously cos where the accident did happen,

there was no way an ambulance could get up there.

So we had to rely on the air ambulance.

Coming up... The workman run over by a mobile crane is on his way

to the operating theatre, but can surgeons save his leg?

The air ambulances are kept in the air by charity and sponsorship,

and there's very few patients who don't become big supporters after they're rescued.

But there's another group of donors who keep the service in the air.

They're doctors like Andy Pountney,

who give up their own time to help save lives.

Andy's been flying with Helimed 99's paramedics for three years.

And today, another patient's going to benefit from his expertise.

On the outskirts of Doncaster in South Yorkshire,

a young driver's injured.

His car's left the road and rolled into a field.

Andy's one of a new breed of doctors who are venturing out of casualty departments

and taking life-saving skills to roads and fields across the country.

For patients who are seriously injured,

Andy's expertise can make the difference between life and death.

The paramedics are obviously very experienced,

very well trained and they can deal with the majority of situations.

Just occasionally, an incident will come up

when we can bring something else to that job,

whether that be, you know, ketamine for very strong pain relief,

or a small surgical procedure, a chest intervention,

whether they need an emergency anaesthetic to control their airway

or their breathing or to control a head injury.

So in those instances, it is useful to be able to take a medic to the scene.

ETA, four minutes, and they say the patient's quite agitated, Andy.

OK, then.

This is not good news. Andy's used to dealing with patients in hospital,

with the help and support of an A&E unit.

But without this back-up, this could be a very difficult situation.

Give me some big breaths.

-What are you doing?

-Just take some big breaths.

Andy's with him. The paramedics...

are on scene, and they've stabilised him to this point.

We'll just get t'aircraft ready.

Because he's packaged already, we'll get him off as quick as we can.

And there's good news. Numerous tests and scans at hospital revealed no long-term damage.

Back in more familiar surroundings, Andy's back on shift at Dewsbury District Hospital.

Same on both sides?

-Yeah.

-Yeah. Down here?

I've been a doctor now for about 10 years or so, working in acute specialities of one sort or another.

Wiggle your feet a bit for me.

Working in emergency is great, you get a huge variety of stuff here,

but when you are out of hospital it's not only the variety of the case mix,

it's the variety of locations and scenes as well.

And every incident that you attend, whether it be a road collision or an assault, a shooting,

stabbing, or a medical problem, they're all different.

And being out of hospital brings its own challenges, which is quite nice.

Modern A&E units are full of state-of-the-art equipment

with specialist staff on hand 24 hours a day.

Being able to take at least some aspects of hospital directly to a patient is a challenge.

It could be dark, cold, wet, rainy. Often you're by yourself.

It can be a very, kind of, lonely place out there.

You haven't got all the back-up and support.

It's Saturday night, and in Leeds city centre,

revellers are downing the pints and swallowing the shots.

It's going to be another busy night for the ambulance service.

Tonight, they've got back-up.

As well as being a flying doctor, Andy also uses a more conventional

means of transport to get to his patients.

He's part of the West Yorkshire Medic Response Team.

Primarily, we're gonna look at trauma jobs,

so RTCs - road traffic collisions - shootings, stabbings, falls...

The Leeds Hospital Fund, through Central Ambulance, agreed

to support the Medic Response Scheme for a period of two years.

Do you know where this road is?

And it's not long before the team are dispatched to their first job.

We've been tasked to an RTA, pedestrian knock-down, in Ossett.

About nine miles from the job,

so we should be there in probably seven or eight minutes.

Tonight, Andy is training another emergency doctor, Ross Hemingway.

We're waiting for information if a crew get there before us.

Otherwise, we'll be first on scene and see what injuries we find.

They might not be in a helicopter, but in a high-performance car with blue lights,

they can still race to the scene at speeds of well over 80 mph.

And they need to. It's clear the man has suffered some serious injuries.

All knock-downs have the potential for serious injuries, but...

We'll have to wait and see till we get there.

It depends what speed the car was doing.

Other emergency services are on the scene, but Andy and Ross can deliver

life-saving treatment that paramedics can't.

Tonight, that expertise might prove vital.

-Where are we gonna go from here, Pinders?

-Yeah, mate.

First job - relieving the man's pain.

So you're not allergic to anything? No? This is some morphine.

Might make you feel a bit dizzy, light-headed, but it should help the pain.

The pedestrian was crossing the road when he was hit by an oncoming car.

Morphine eased his pain, but Andy must now put his badly broken leg into a splint.

-Is it any better after the morphine?

-A lot better.

Just tell him we're gonna have to pop it into the box.

I want him to grit his teeth.

It'll be done in three seconds.

Everybody ready? One, two, three.

Even with the leg stabilised, he needs to be in hospital fast.

Ross, are you happy to take the head while we do a roll onto the board,

and explain to him what we're gonna do? Nice one.

The main injury is his leg. He's got a quite nasty open fracture, which was fairly angulated and displaced.

He was in pain, but he's had some morphine, which allowed us to reduce it.

Because he's got a very painful injury, that may distract him from other injuries.

We have to treat him like he's got a neck or a back injury

until proven otherwise with X-rays.

So we're taking him, and he'll be looked at in more detail down there.

There's only so much Andy can do in the middle of a busy road,

and he knows better than anyone

that patients with such serious injuries need the expert care that only a hospital can provide.

As a doctor attending that job, I was able to administer morphine to that patient,

which the paramedics couldn't have,

so that allowed us to get on top of the gentleman's pain quickly and sort out his leg,

which allowed us to get him packaged and away from the scene quickly.

Obviously, it's freezing cold tonight,

so the less time he was laid on his back on the floor, the better.

'They're on Otley Road. They were heading up towards Leeds 16...'

It's a hectic start to the night for Andy and Ross,

but they're about to get a job all ambulance crews dread.

Three road traffics being called in at pretty much the same time,

so we're trying to prioritise them through the communications centre.

The one that appears to be most serious from the information we've got

is involving an ambulance which was on its way to a job and has been involved in an accident itself.

It's clear that the ambulance has been involved in a serious accident.

Andy and Ross know they could end up treating colleagues or friends.

Particularly if it's people you know,

obviously there's kind of an emotional side attached to it there.

But it's a case of just trying to detach from it

and get on with the job as necessary.

As you say, it can be difficult if it's people that you know.

We're the first on the scene, by the look of it.

Andy and Ross are the first to arrive and quickly start assessing the patients.

But, much to everyone's relief, the ambulance crew and the car driver

have had a lucky escape and there's no serious injuries.

For Andy and Ross, this is a graphic example of the dangers medics face when working out of hospital.

Back in the city centre, and the night's hard drinking is beginning to take its toll.

It's 11.30pm now, so all the pubs have kicked out.

Town is quite busy at the moment, so there's always potential for people

to start fighting and fall over when they're drunk and so on.

A bit later in the night, often we start picking up more road accidents.

Andy's prediction is proved right.

There's been a fight outside a club and the crew are quickly on their way.

Andy and Ross have to be careful.

Every weekend, ambulance crews are the victims

of violent assaults when they're trying to treat patients.

Get out of the road, all right?

This is a volatile atmosphere and it's clear one man has come off worse.

He's got a nasty facial injury and Andy and Ross quickly call for back-up.

Gone to M&S and just walked back and seen your car.

With the man in the hands of a local ambulance crew,

they leave the clubbers to enjoy the rest of the night.

But Andy and Ross's hopes for a quiet end to the evening are all quickly forgotten.

So the job that we've got through is a male,

a Russian male, we don't know his age, who's been stabbed.

We don't know exactly where he's been stabbed.

The caller coming through has said that he's stopped breathing, and...

his heart has stopped beating, he hasn't got a pulse,

so it sounds like he's in what we call cardio respiratory arrest.

A street in Bradford is being transformed into a crime scene

and police think the attacker might still be in the house.

He might need anaesthetising. He might have severe chest injuries,

we can do specialised surgical procedures.

The injured man is in the basement.

His survival depends on how fast Andy and Ross can get to the scene.

But before they can start treating him,

the police must ensure it's safe for them to even get close.

We've got information of where the stand-off point is.

Clearly, an incident like this, out-of-doors, patient's stabbed...

We think it's potentially very serious, if not fatally injured.

We don't want to be wading in. The assailant may still be there.

We haven't got any information, so we need this scene to be safe before we go near.

We've just been given the standby point.

We're gonna wait here until we're assured by the armed police

that the scene is safe for us to go in.

Finally, the police have the situation under control and the team

get the call that it's safe to go in, but they could be too late.

Because the police wanted to preserve evidence,

they'd asked the staff of the ambulance

just to go down and confirm that the patient was dead.

We then got a shout from one of the officers that the patient actually may not be dead

and that we should go in and assist.

At that point, everybody went into the house and it was chaos.

Police were kicking down doors, dragging people out handcuffed.

We were trying to battle past those, trying to get to the patient.

We were directed down into a basement.

When we got down there, it was just kind of carnage, really.

Andy and Ross perform a surgical procedure on the man's chest

before racing to the waiting ambulance.

Despite all of their expertise, Andy and Ross know he'll be lucky to survive.

The injured man needs surgery as soon as possible, and the team

work tirelessly just to keep him alive long enough to reach hospital.

But, this time, it's not enough.

The man suffers huge blood loss and dies in hospital.

For Andy and Ross, it's a disappointing end to a long shift,

but it's jobs like these that show it's not just hospitals that need the life-saving skills of a doctor.

A ride in the air ambulance is often the start of a long recovery process

for the patients the Helimed team pick up.

But, for some, going home is a major milestone.

39-year-old Darren Patterson is a long way off that day.

His leg was crushed by a mobile crane as he worked on a drainage contract in North Yorkshire.

The bones in his leg are broken in several places and paramedic Pat

fears the blood supply to his right foot may have been compromised.

The team have battled through appalling weather to reach hospital in Scarborough,

but Darren fears the worst.

-It's crushed.

-Yeah, you've broken it.

-Without a shadow of the doubt, you've broken it.

-It's shattered.

We don't know how shattered it is.

Right, yeah.

There'll be a lot of work to be done on it, I'll give you that.

We'll have to find out how good your blood supply to your leg is,

and the nerve damage and stuff like that, if there's nerve damage.

So they'll assess all that here and then there probably will be an operation either today or tomorrow

to stabilise the leg.

Darren will soon find out the truth.

He'll be wheeled straight to the orthopaedics department of Scarborough District Hospital.

For pilot Steve Cobb, it's a chance to talk at last

about a flight he won't forget.

He'd never flown in any type of vehicle before,

so he was a little bit wary about that.

Although people were thinking, it's raining quite a bit here,

we didn't like to say anything,

so it was more of a case of nodding and winking and working out what we were gonna do and say.

Pick a major road and ask for an ambulance by land.

We can sit it out.

Sammy a few times said, "We can use the road ambulance if we need to,"

just reminding me we did have options.

We didn't say where we were going.

We just said, "We'll go to Scarborough instead."

Just kept it all low-key for the sake of the patient.

A few days before, bright sunshine. Two hours later,

it was bright sunshine.

But just at that time, very widespread thunderstorms

and we just happened to be in the wrong place for that one.

Less than a week later, Darren finds out what the future holds.

He's recovering from a complex operation that could be the first of several.

And the good news.

He's improving fast.

I did think that...

I'd lose it below the knee at one stage,

cos I looked at it and it didn't look very good.

Obviously, I got my boot off,

and it didn't look very good at all.

Just marvellous what they can do, innit?

I've got four pins in, holding what bone that is left together,

and they're stopping for a week till the swelling goes down,

then I get another two steel pins to replace the main bones.

My ankle and my heel are shattered,

but they're just gonna have to sort of mend themselves.

Darren won't be forgetting his first flight in a hurry.

Lucky they got here as quick as they did. That's for sure.

Well, I feel, if it'd been a lot longer, you could have lost it,

if it hadn't been for the air ambulance.

It's a big difference between 20 minutes and 50 minutes if something's vital, innit?

Never been in a helicopter or an aeroplane in my life.

I've never been as pleased to see one arrive!

It's amazing what doctors can do now with fractured limbs.

It's not that many years ago when maybe Darren would have had his leg amputated.

He may be a long time on crutches and it may seem a long time for him,

but it won't be long till he's back up on two feet.

That's all from Helicopter Heroes.

When we come back, paramedic Darren is forced to commandeer a car as fog shrouds a major accident.

The fog is on top of the incident and we can't get in.

A bird man falls to earth, with painful consequences.

Being a medical doctor, I knew that, when he hit his back,

we'd have to treat a spinal injury.

There's a serious accident on one of the UK's most dangerous roads.

Combined speeds, 140 mph...

Any pain down here a bit?

And the team mount a tricky rescue after a man falls down a rock face.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

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