Gama Aviation has opened a new purpose-built base at Glasgow Airport to support its contract with the Scottish Ambulance Service (SAS). The base will house Scotland’s national specialist transport and retrieval service (ScotSTAR) for critically ill NHS patients and will be the first time in the UK that all the country’s national retrieval services will operate from a single, central base.
Gama Aviation has carried out air operations for the SAS since 1993 with its current contract due to run until 2020. The number of flights operated by the company has grown annually – last year Gama Aviation carried out 491 missions out of a total of 2,654 cases to which the ScotSTAR teams responded.
Gama Aviation currently operates two Beechcraft King Air 200C fixed wing turboprop aircraft based at Glasgow and Aberdeen airports, along with two dedicated Eurocopter EC145T2 helicopters located in Glasgow and Inverness. This core fleet is supplemented when needed by Eurocopter Super Puma helicopters based in both Shetland and Aberdeen.
Ryan McGrath, regional manager Scotland, Gama Aviation, said, “The contract with the Scottish Ambulance Service covers some of the most important missions we undertake as they can literally be a matter of life or death. Our investment in the new base will allow for a seamless incident response and patient transfer which is a bespoke service for Scotland. This highlights the advantage to our clients of pairing their own capabilities with our external aviation expertise to deliver a high quality, cost effective service.”
October 27, 2015
