Careflight helicopter pilot

Alice Wasley

As a helicopter pilot for NRMA Careflight, an air ambulance service, Bo Conneryd experiences his fair share of adrenalin rushes but he says the most adventurous thing he has done lately was move his family from Sweden to Australia for the year.

Conneryd, 44, his wife Kerstin, who works as a doctor with Careflight, and their two boys Jonas, 11, and Charlie, 7, packed up and moved to Australia after Conneryd met some Australian Careflight pilots in Norway.

At the time, he was working for the Norwegian Air Ambulance. Careflight kept in touch and offered him the position.

“It turned out it was a package deal for the whole family,” Conneryd says. “The kids go to school in Waverley. They enjoy it here. Our seven-year-old couldn’t speak a word of English when we came here but he gets along fine.”

Conneryd fell into the position of a helicopter pilot after joining the Swedish Army in 1986.

“There hasn’t been a day that I didn’t want to go to work,” he says of being an air ambulance pilot. “I was in the army as a tank officer. You could test to become an army helicopter pilot and one of my friends applied for me and he didn’t make it, but I did.”

As a Careflight pilot, Conneryd mostly attends car accidents around Sydney and incidents where people have been rendered unconscious. The team also attends a lot of accidents involving children.

“The accidents with children are by far the worst things we see here. And if that doesn’t affect you, then it’s time to quit,” he says.

“Of course you see bad things -and I heard an explanation the other day that when you make a good rescue it stays for a long, long time and you can actually live on that for a while.”

“But if something goes bad -I mean bad accidents involving someone actually dying — it stays for a much shorter time. That’s not a bad way of putting it. You’re far more affected by the positive times than the negative.”

It’s a job for competent pilots but not necessarily for flying buffs, Conneryd says.

“This is a job that you either like or you don’t. I’ve seen [some] pilots working for us and they leave after about six months or a year. It’s not an environment for people really into aviation. If you go to the lunchroom at Qantas, they will speak a lot about aviation but here it’s more about missions,” he says.

Conneryd works 12-hour shifts and an average day for the pilot starts with an inspection of the helicopter and then the crew “wait for something to happen”.

“We actually see the triple-0 screens now, as part of the Head Injury Retrieval Trial,” he says. “We take turns during the day to watch the screens then call the doctor [to see if we should take action]. Because we see the screens, our response times are very short.”