SCHUYLER — Alex Ripka has been refurbishing helicopters in the middle of his family’s farmland since the late 1970s. Suddenly, one of his hangars is about to become the new base for an air-ambulance service. “For 40 years, I opened the doors and I didn’t so much as have a mouse in here,” Ripka says. […]
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“For 40 years, I opened the doors and I didn’t so much as have a mouse in here,” Ripka says. “Now I have people that are going to be living here.”
Ripka owns a 3,900-square-foot hangar at 368 Shorlots Road in the town of Schuyler (in western Herkimer County) that’s set to become a new base for a Mercy Flight Central medevac helicopter. That means 14 people will work from the structure, including three-person helicopter crews who will be on hand around the clock to airlift patients.
Mercy Flight Central plans to use the location to serve patients within a 60-mile radius that blankets Utica and Rome, it announced Feb. 7. The nonprofit wants to begin flying from the new base in March.
It will be Mercy Flight Central’s first outpost in the Utica–Rome area. The organization has helicopters and an airplane at its headquarters at Canandaigua Airport, and it stations a helicopter at Marcellus Airport.
The Schuyler base sits amid 150 acres of farmland filled with more than 200 cows, Ripka says. But he indicates that he isn’t too disappointed to be losing privacy in his hangar.
“I have a passion for helicopters,” he says. “And it’s going to be saving lives.”
Some renovations are needed to prepare the hangar for around-the-clock use, according to Neil Snedeker, president and CEO of Mercy Flight Central. Work under way includes adding a crew quarters, office space, and a day room. The nonprofit is performing the construction with its own employees, who started building at the beginning of 2013.
Expanding into Utica comes after years of consideration, Snedeker adds.
“We did a detailed analysis of the entire state of New York, where all the medevac helicopters are positioned,” he says. “What was glaringly obvious was the Utica area, which is also called mid-state, had no coverage.”
In the past, Mercy Flight Central served the region from its Marcellus base, Snedeker continues. A helicopter leaving Marcellus Airport took about 25 minutes to reach the Utica area, decreasing its speed advantage over ground-based emergency medical services, he says.
The new base will allow Mercy Flight Central to reach patients in about 10 minutes. Shorter response times will probably lead to more air transports — the nonprofit estimates it will add 100 transports a year thanks to the location. Previously, ambulance crews in the area often wouldn’t call a helicopter but would instead run patients to a hospital as quickly as possible by ground.
“The Utica area was very sensitive to the time issue,” Snedeker says. “They knew it was going to take 30 minutes for a helicopter to get there, so they would just, as they call it, scoop and run. Which is reasonable. It was the right thing to do.”
In addition to the three-person flight crews working out of the new Schuyler base, the location will also have a mechanic and a development employee in charge of philanthropy. Most of those workers will be new employees, although the base will be staffed by current Mercy Flight Central workers at first. That’s because nurses and paramedics need to go through a two-month training program before they can work on helicopters, according to Snedeker.
Currently, Mercy Flight Central has 51 employees. It will likely have 60 once all Schuyler hiring is complete.
Snedeker doesn’t anticipate the new location eating into calls to the Marcellus Airport base. Mercy Flight Central currently responds to about 225 calls a year from that location, he says.
“What we believe will happen is the Marcellus call volume will probably increase,” he says. “Once you put a helicopter in the Utica area, people start to use that helicopter, which in turn means the Marcellus site will probably end up getting some backup calls.”
Late this spring, Mercy Flight Central hopes to add a fourth helicopter. The new aircraft will serve as a backup that can take over in case any of the organization’s three primary helicopters need to be repaired. It will cost about $2 million, although the nonprofit will purchase it used, Snedeker says.
Opening the new base pushes Mercy Flight Central’s 2013 budget up to about $14.7 million. It had been $12.2 million in 2012. The nonprofit believes it can pay for the base with its added patient revenue and additional fundraising.
Sources of revenue for Mercy Flight Central include fundraising, patient revenue through Medicare and Medicaid, patient insurance, no-fault insurance, and cash payments.
However, the expansion was not driven by financial considerations, Snedeker stresses.
“We’re another link in the chain of survival,” he says. “We assist the fire and EMS, police and hospitals. Our operations staff is thrilled to be able to do this because we all feel this is our core mission.”
Contact Seltzer at rseltzer@cnybj.com