HELICOPTER NIGHT LANDING SITE TO TAKE OFF IN COLYTON

Colyton Parish Council has recently voted to support a project to enable Devon Air Ambulance (DAA) to land at night at the Colyton Peace Memorial Playing Field.

These sites are pre-surveyed and have lighting in place for both safety and practical reasons – it will illuminate the site during landing and take-off and will help paramedics when assessing and loading a patient into the aircraft. Colyton in an emergency.

There are currently 37 fully operational landing sites up and running, with over a 130 further night landing sites in development through Devon.
Toby Russell, of DAA, is working closely with the community at Colyton and recently held a meeting to present the idea to the community. At that meeting Toby said: “The site at Colyton Peace Memorial Playing Field offers a very good location to land at night as it is a large open space, it offers good access to the community in the event our paramedics need to leave the site on foot to go to a patient and has nearby parking should a patient be brought to the aircraft by land ambulance crew

Toby explained that communities have very much taken ownership of developing their own landing site, not only part-funding them but also undertaking to ensure they are kept in good order. He went on to say that the Charity are now in a position to offer grants to help communities like those at Colyton which will not only help communities save time and effort in securing their own funds or donations but will help grow the network of night landing sites throughout Devon.

Whilst the Charity can provide a grant to cover the costs of installing the lighting at Colyton Peace Memorial Playing Field, the community now needs to raise the funds to purchase the equipment required.

Local groups in Colyton; the Promote Colyton Group, Nunsford Nutters and the Carnival Committee are all supporting the initiative but we need £3500 to enable the project to go ahead.