By ANNELIA NIXON

Tribune Business Reporter

anixon@tribunemedia.net

TROPIC Ocean Airways and REVA Air Ambulance have partnered to provide medical services to remote Family Islands with ambitions to expand throughout The Bahamas.

Having carried out 100 rescues in The Bahamas since December 2022, the partners - who mainly cater to those in need on remote islands and cays, cruise ships, yachts and resorts,are looking to expand into other areas of The Bahamas.

“One of the big goals in the initial talks was expanding into The Bahamas,” Sean Bryan, director of medical operations at REVA Air Ambulance, said. “You know, Bahamas, with all the islands, we know that there’s definitely medical needs throughout if you’re not here [New Providence] or Freeport.

“So we get a lot of requests to transfer into Bahamas, and it’s just not something that we can completely execute at this time due to cabotage. But I know, from a growth perspective, I know that’s one thing that we would like to see. And Tropic has a sister company [Seaplane Safaris] that’s parked here at the airport as well.”

Chris Davy, Tropic Ocean Airways captain and director of safety and training, added: “We have a sister company here based in The Bahamas that’s Bahamas-owned and run with Bahamian pilots. And we provide the aircraft, we provide the long-term maintenance, we provide the pilot training for that operation.

“So we have a very close relationship with them. And they do, as they’re a Bahamian company, they do inter-island work, and they will also be expanding into doing inter-island medevac services. Whereas at the moment, our medevac (medical evacuation) tends to be from the Bahamas islands to mainland US, but that’s something that we’re going to expand on as well. But the pilots that fly for us at the company are all local based.

“We also go to not just private islands, but the same islands that normally you’d have to get a ferry if somebody was injured or they were sick. They would have to get a taxi to the ferry port, and then the ferry to go to another island that has a runway, and then from there to the airport. We can literally go to meet somebody at the beach or the dock or the golf course, or wherever it happens to be. So we take out a lot of the travel time.”

The Fort Lauderdale-based company prides itself on being an “amphibious plane” which can “do land to water, water back to land”, according to Julia Miller, first officer at Tropic Ocean Airways. Mr Davy said its operations keep the environment safe with the planes ability to navigate both air, land and sea, making it more accessible than other forms of air travel, especially for medical needs.

“In terms of infrastructure... one of the beauties of what we’re doing is that we don’t need a runway, we don’t need a helipad to be able to land on,” Mr Davy said. “We literally... can pull up on the beach or a dock, so any facility that has boat facilities we can potentially use for our sea plane.

“So we’re not having to destroy any of the natural marine life, or any of the flora and fauna, to have the logistical ability to go in and rescue people where we need to. And in terms of other background as well, I would like to just add that Tropic has historically been helping with the hurricane damage in The Bahamas, and I think that was one of the other things that we had humanitarian aid coming in and out of The Bahamas for many years with those kind of rescue missions, which has precipitated this relationship, which we’re very keen to expand on.

“We’re based in Fort Lauderdale, and we do scheduled service to Bimini. We do services to a lot of the islands already, and plus we have charters where we can take off from the main international airport, like Fort Lauderdale, and we can land on a remote cay, next to a remote cay or a bay, and pull up to the beach, and the time it saves from people, and also the less damage to the environment, because we don’t need a helipad or a runway to land,” Mr Davy continued. 

“But we pick people up in different places in the US as well, and then bring them to The Bahamas, too. But our CEO set up the company specifically to serve The Bahamas. It’s expanded to other areas as well now, but Bahamas is still our main focus.”

Mr Bryan added: “Our CEO at the company was in contact with the CEO of Tropic Air, and that was in late 2022. And there was this great idea of: How do we access these very hard to reach areas. So we began to have some talks that led to a couple different meetings over about three to four months. And then the question was asked to me, from a clinical perspective, from our CEO and CFO, can we do this?

“And my answer is, absolutely. There’s a way. It’s an airplane, and we do it in many different air frames. So we then went down the route with our medevac company that outfits our aircrafts, and we made sure that we were able to secure the correct STC so we can outfit it like a flying ambulance, essentially.

“We went through all the regulations, all of our accrediting bodies to make sure that what we were doing was safe, and that’s from a regulatory standpoint; that we’re safe in that aircraft. So it is a registered ambulance based out of South Florida, so EMS comes out and inspects it, and then from there, we had to wait about a month or two until we were able to fly.”