Medevac training system preserving life-saving skills.

• Author: Magnuson, Stew

DOBBINS AIR RESERVE BASE, Ga.--If a combat medic makes it to a wounded U.S. service member on today's battlefield, the victim has a 98 percent chance of survival.

That number is unheard of in the history of warfare, said Lt. Col. Chad Corliss, the Air Force's 94th air evacuation squadron director of operations.

In World War II, it was a 30 percent mortality rate. For the Korean War, Vietnam War and first Gulf War, it remained at about 25 percent. And that's where it was when hostilities began in October 2001, he said. The last four years have seen a tremendous leap to where only two of 100 of those who survive long enough to see a combat medic, the of their wounds.

"We want to chase zero. We want zero percent to the of wounds. I don't think that is going to happen but what I don't want to happen is for us to go back to 24 percent," Corliss said.

To that end, the Air Force has acquired a simulator that reproduces the long missions medical flight crews must endure while taking care of patients in the back of transportation aircraft.

Corliss said there is a risk as operations wind down that some of the vital skills that have kept that survival figure so high might be lost.

"We want to keep those skills. We've got them right now. We have learned a lot in 10 years of combat," he said in an interview with reporters.

"What we don't want in our next conflict with new nurses, new med-techs coming in, is not knowing what we have learned and having to learn it all over again," he said.

The Aeromedical Simulation and Training Center at Dobbins Air Reserve Base received the first aeromedical evacuation training device in the spring. Built by CAE Health USA, a division of the Canada-based modeling and simulation company, it reproduces in high detail the back of a C-130 E or H models' fuselage where medical flight crews care for mock patients in the form of realistic manikins.

It reproduces the lighting, sounds, intercom, breathable air stations and configurations of a medevac aircraft. The idea is to mimic the high-stress scenarios that such flight crews experience in the real world, Corliss said.

Since such aircraft also resupply forward positions, loadmasters must be able to push pallets off after landing. The medical technicians and nurses then have about 10 minutes to reconfigure the back of the aircraft to receive patients.

This is often done at night in hot zones, which requires crews to wear night vision goggles as they perform their tasks. The...