From taking on the biggest helicopter aeromedical retrieval and rescue contract in Australian history in partnership with NSW Health, to designing and building a state-of-the-art high fidelity aeromedical training centre – the last two years have brought great success to Toll Helicopters.
And this hasn’t gone unnoticed; leading industry publication Australian Aviation recently profiled Toll Helicopters and the ACE Training Centre, covering everything from the provision of patient rescue services for communities in southern New South Wales to the impressive technology on offer for pilots at the purpose-built training centre in Bankstown.
Since beginning the aeromedical helicopter rescue contract with NSW Health in January, the Toll Helicopters fleet of Leonardo AW139 helicopters has grown from two to eight, which are now successfully operating on a 10-minutes’ notice to launch by day and 20-minutes’ notice at night from four bases Sydney/Bankstown, Wollongong, Orange and Canberra.
The ACE Training Centre features a CAE 3000 series AW139 Level D full-flight motion simulator – the most advanced of its kind in the world – as well as a Helicopter Underwater Escape Training (HUET) simulator rigged above a pool, capable of producing challenging weather conditions including waves and winds, and a virtual reality-based Complete Aircrew Training System (CATS).
Mark Delany, General Manager of Toll Helicopters, said that the training centre provides Toll operators and others from across the aeromedical industry with access to highly realistic training scenarios that combine practical exercises with virtual and augmented reality-based technology.
“We wanted to do a better job at training our people for their roles and we wanted to improve operational capability and excellence, standardisation and most importantly, safety. To do that we needed to change how we were training our people. Our ACE training program, is really innovative and a step change for the world in terms of how we train for emergency medical services.”