Helicopter Heros

BBC1 – 7:30pm Monday – Helicopter Heros
A half hour program hosted by Richard “Hamster” Hammond on the job of the flying paramedics in response to them saving his life when he crashed a jet powered car (highly publicised by the press at the time) and from which he made a full recovery.

I missed the first few minutes and my first impressions were that this was going to be all about the helicopter paramedics attending motorbike crashes and having a general go at bikers with a downer on biking. Fortunately I was to be proved wrong. Yes, there was a badly mangled motorbike and rider and the scene was the Snake Pass near Glossop, but, other accidents involved a hiker on the Derbyshire Peaks and a car that left the road, impacted a tree so hard it cut it in half and then passed between 2 more trees before finally coming to rest on it’s side minus a wheel and with every single panel smashed.

The biker was successfully recovered to hospital but later died from the internal injuries sustained. The hiker had a broken leg (just above the ankle) and a head wound to the forehead. The person found in the car claimed he’d not been driving so a fruitless search was undertaken to find a non-existent “driver” – and at that point they stopped coverage of that incident (obviously the badly busted up occupant was trying to hide something other than the fact he’d written off a brand new car!

All in all it was a fairly balanced approach to the subject, with equal coverage to the accident types as far as they were able. No “get the biker” attitude (Hamster is pro-motorbikes and owns/rides a Ducati) which was a pleasant change in this country today where H&S seems to dominate the “Nanny State” culture we live in. Hopefully the rest of the series will continue in the same balanced manner and if it does I’ll be a regular viewer.