By Daniel Drainville
The Day
NORWICH, Conn. — While Norwich Free Academy students were lugging their backpacks across campus on their way to their next classes Wednesday morning, Life Star helicopter began circling overhead.
It appeared, blue and white, with its big white star emblazoned across the side — distant but clear against the pale blue, cloud-speckled sky. The “thwop-thwop-thwop” sound of the helicopter blades grew louder as it neared the field where it would be landing. Just outside the fence to the school’s turf field, hundreds of students and staff were gathered to greet it.
Through emails, social media or word-of-mouth from friends, they’d learned the helicopter was going to be landing as part of a demonstration coordinated by the school with Hartford Healthcare. Junior Kyla Rivera said it didn’t take long for word to spread and excitement to grow over the spectacle.
Rivera and other students said they’d never seen a helicopter land before.
“I want to see how they actually save people,” she said.
Senior Jack Pichette said his teacher had let his whole kinesiology class come out to witness it.
“I don’t think I’ve seen this before, at any other school,” he added.
Senior Chloe Green said she was “hype” to see it.
At 11:32 a.m., the landing skids of the helicopter touched down on the turf field. As the rotor spun to a halt, jumpsuit-clad paramedics Aaron Olk and Samantha Mercer, and pilot Jeff Arnold exited and walked toward the crowd. Later on, they provided 100 students a tour of the helicopter, and answered questions from interested students about their jobs.
“We do lots of promos, but I’ve never seen (anything) with this amount of students showing up, and the fanfare that we received is wild,” Mercer said. “The energy was amazing.”
Mercer, an NFA graduate, later explained to students the helicopter, out of Backus Hospital, is one of three operated by critical care helicopter service Life Star. The other two are at MidState Medical Center in Meriden and at the Westfield-Barnes Regional Airport in Westfield, Mass. The service covers the entire state of Connecticut, along with Rhode Island and western Massachusetts, and backs up other air programs throughout New England and New York.
“The majority of what we do is actually inter-facility. So we’re usually taking somebody from one hospital to another,” she said. “If they’re too sick for whatever they have going on, we take them to a bigger hospital.”
Pilot Jeff Arnold said landing on a football field is not out of the ordinary for Life Star. Pilots look for big open spaces to land because they are safer.
“You’ll see a lot of air ambulance helicopters landing on football fields, or big, open parking lots, or soccer fields. They’re convenient, because there’s no trees and it’s a wide open space with few hazards,” Arnold said. “(But) you usually don’t have quite the fanfare.”
Arnold let students climb into the cockpit, ask questions and take photos, while another Hartford Healthcare representative showed how the stretcher is loaded and unloaded from the back.
After graduating NFA, Mercer got her nursing degree from Three Rivers Community College, and then worked at American Ambulance, Backus and Hartford hospitals before taking to the skies.
“And now I’ve been here for five years,” she said. “So it’s not an entry-level job to do this, but it’s really cool because there’s so many different pathways that you can take.”
Under a new health care pathway at NFA, students can learn about careers in health care by actually going to work at Hartford Healthcare facilities.
College and Career Center Director Linda Farinha said recently an NFA teacher was up at one of those facilities, in Hartford, where they talked about Life Star being willing to land anywhere.
“And so we said, why not here?” Farinha said.
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