It was the first comprehensive aerial medical organization in the world and remains unique for the range of services it provides and the huge area of sparse population and climate extremes over which it operates twenty four hours a day, three hundret and sixty five days a year. The story of the Flying Doctor Service began when, in 1911, the Reverend John Flynn, a Presbyterian clergyman, took up his first appointment after his ordination at Beltana Mission in the north of South Australia. He soon recognised that the vaste distances and poor communication created fearsome difficulties when anyone was sick or injured. He established the Australian Inland Mission in 1912 and set up bush hospitals and hostels in the remote outback which alleviated much of the dread associated with the great loneliness of the inland. But the greatest fear of all remained: the anxiety about becoming ill or hurt far from doctors and hospitals, with no way of summoning aid. Flynn and his men found many instances on their patrols when lives could have been saved if medical attention had been available and he dreamed of a flying doctor sevice which would spread a mantle of safety over the outback.
With extraordinary vision, John Flynn saw the potentional after the First Wolrd War of drawing together the then new and experimental technologies of wireless and aviation to serve the medical and pastoral needs of isolated people. Using the aviation strategies first suggested by nineteen-year-old Lt. Clifford Peel, and the new pedal radio invented by Alfred Traeger, he established the Areal Medical Service in 1928 under the aegis of the Australian Inland Mission. From its first Base at Cloncurry in May, 1928, the first pilot, Authur Affleck, and the first flying doctor Dr K St Vincent Welch made the first flight in a small DeHavilland D50 aircraft leased at five shillings a mile from the fledgling Queensland andNorthern Territory Aerial Service, later to become QUANTAS.
Today the Royal Flying Doctor Service of Australia serves an area of 7,150,000 square kilometres - the largest territory covered by an aero-medical service in the world. RFDS Sections have 38 aircraft at our 16 bases around Australia.
Headquaters Royal Flying Doctors Service
Broken Hill
