Evacuation of tsunami victims to Sweden: experiences of the use of a corporate jet aircraft

Objectives: A tsunami hit Thailand and affected 25 000 Swedish holidaymakers on December 25, 2004. The transportation home of injured Swedish citizens had to be improvised. One of the several assets used was a corporate jet put at the disposal of the Swedish foreign ministry. The aim of this study was to evaluate the improvised use of this corporate jet aircraft to support evacuation of injured citizens hit by disaster in a foreign country. Materials and methods: A Falcon 900 EX jet with capacity to carry 14 seated or 6 stretcher cases was used. Refueling and change of crew took place in Dubai. Five physicians were recruited for an assessment team with the task of locating patients and evaluating them before transport. The assessment team stayed in Thailand to locate patients for the next trip while the jet made the round trip to Sweden (32 hours). The team reported regularly to Swedish healthcare ministry officials in an improvised coordination center in Phuket. Results: Fifteen Swedish tsunami victims were transported from Thailand by the corporate jet in three round trips. Twelve additional patients were evaluated and allocated to other medical evacuation flights. In total 1500 injured Swedish citizens were transported to Sweden, most of whom were able to use regular flights as seated passengers. Conclusion: When the operation started on December 31, many injured Swedish citizens were still in Thailand because of delays in the response from the Swedish authorities and were being treated in hospitals at different locations. Due to lack of deployment of a sufficient number of assessment teams, a substantial amount of time was needed to locate patients and to evaluate whether or not they could be transported without risk. Our experience is that ground assessment teams cooperating with local resources are necessary and, if insufficient, can limit transport capacity more than air-carrying capacity. A coordination center must handle a considerable amount of information and ID numbers are necessary to avoid duplicates; we made good use of group text messages (SMS) from cell phones to facilitate this aspect.