Aeromedical evacuation
France and the United Kingdom used fully organized aeromedical evacuation services during the African and Middle Eastern colonial wars of the 1920s.[3] By 1936, an organized military air ambulance service evacuated wounded from the Spanish Civil War for medical treatment in Nazi Germany.The US Navy joined the mission in 1944 by using various seaplanes and PB4Y aircraft to fly patients from remote Pacific islands to larger bases and on to stateside hospitals.During the Korean War the Army began using helicopters for transporting casualties from the battlefield to rear area hospitals and MASH units, Air Force C-47s were then used to fly patients to large airfields where they were later transported on to Japan, Hawaii and the US by C-54 and also newer C-97, C-121 and C-124 which could carry up to 127 litters or a combination of up to 200 litter and ambulatory patients.In 1954 the Air Force received its first dedicated AE platform, the C-131 Samaritan, which could carry 27 litter patients and had a range of 1500 miles, it was later supplemented with the MC-118 and in 1968 by the C-9 Nightingale, a modified version of the DC-9 commercial airliner.The US entry into Vietnam began a slow buildup of AE assets in the Pacific and Southeast Asia, at the height of the war intratheater missions were flown using helicopters and older C-47 and C-54 aircraft, retrograde missions to Japan, The Philippines were flown using the newer C-141 transport which could carry up to 80 litters or a mix of 125 litter and ambulatory on non-stop routes to Alaska, California and the east coast.During Operation Desert Storm thousands of wounded and injured were transported from Southwest Asia, while air evac assets were also used in Somalia, the Balkans and also for moving patients in the US during disasters such as Hurricane Katrina.
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