Little rest for chopper crews

The pilots and crew of the Northland Electricity rescue helicopter had an extraordinarily busy 48 hours last weekend, flying a dozen emergency missions virtually from Cape Reinga to Wellington.

The weekend began with a drowning in the Ngunguru Estuary on Saturday and an emergency flight to Whangarei Hospital for the victim's 4-year-old son and his mother.

The deceased, a man in his 30s, had been swimming with his son when he is thought to have suffered a cardiac arrest. Bystanders managed to save the child.

Also on Saturday a child was airlifted from Kaitaia to Whangarei, and two missions were flown from Kaikohe to Whangarei.

One was for a Ngawha prison inmate with a serious medical condition, who had to travel handcuffed to a guard; the other for a boy who had been badly cut after falling through a plate glass window.

Later that day he was flown to Middlemore Hospital in South Auckland for vascular surgery.

On Sunday morning an elderly cruise ship passenger visiting the Bay of Islands on board the Celebrity Solstice required hospital treatment.

He was taken by tender to Waitangi wharf, from where the helicopter flew the ailing man and his partner to Whangarei Hospital. Shortly before midnight he was flown to Auckland for specialist care.

Also on Sunday, one of the two Helimed aircraft took two heart patients from Whangarei to the Coronary Care Unit in Auckland for specialist treatment, while the other flew a sick child to Starship Hospital.

About 5.30am on Monday a woman was transferred from Whangarei to Auckland, again for a medical condition, and at 11.30am one of the choppers flew to Te Hapua, New Zealand's northernmost settlement, to take a female patient to Kaitaia Hospital.

Meanwhile, the other aircraft flew to Masterton on a Life Flight mission to deliver a sick child to Auckland's Starship Hospital.