Aviation + Medicine = survival: Faculty and students from the UND medical and aerospace colleges team up to train aviation majors on accident survival

Despite stereotypes about the catastrophic nature of airplane accidents, the vast majority of pilots and passengers experiencing a fixed-wing airplane emergency do survive.

At the same time, many survivors of accidents suffer an injury that requires immediate medical attention.

This reality prompted Drs. Jon Solberg and Justin Reisenauer – pilots themselves – to reach out to UND’s John D. Odegard School of Aerospace Sciences (SAS) last summer.

As faculty in the UND School of Medicine & Health Sciences (SMHS) Department of Emergency Medicine, the two emergency medicine (EM) physicians contacted associate professor in UND’s Department of Aviation Nick Wilson to ask how much emergency medical training aviation students receive in their undergraduate training.

Wilson’s answer: More is always better.

So the trio came up with a plan – an intensive first-aid workshop for student pilots of all types.

Interprofessional air incident seminar

“Dr. Solberg said he was interested in doing this air incident first aid event,” said Wilson, who doubles as faculty advisor for the college’s Wilderness Pilots Association. “With the great skills both Dr. Solberg and Dr. Reisenauer brought to the table, we were able to provide students with some basic skills for survival post-accident, and help them handle physical trauma in the short term.”

Describing the one-day “crash course,” Wilson said the seminar provided aviation students with basic skills on “how to do splints and tourniquets, and also how to do handle chest wounds or hemorrhage. It’s a very important skill set for these aviation students to learn – and they all loved it. They all found it very practical.”

Reisenauer agreed, explaining that given aircraft design the most common injuries that accident survivors are likely to see are severe bleeding, broken ribs, head and neck injuries, fractures, and lacerations.

“I’m a pilot as well, and I was never was taught anything about how to manage life-threatening injuries if I had an accident,” added Reisenauer. “So, we’re teaching students skills to address that stuff first, but also give them tips on equipment that they can prepare themselves to create their own survival kit. That’s the goal – to help get students proficient at managing and mitigating the most common life-threatening injuries after an accident that they’re not always taught during typical aviation training.”

An emergency medicine physician and aviation medical examiner based in Bismarck, N.D., Reisenauer noted that emergency medicine actually borrowed a page from the aviation playbook, employing an aviation-style A-B-C checklist approach to caring for trauma patients: airway, breathing, and circulation.

“Check, check, and check,” he said with a grin. “The trauma physician who invented the advanced trauma life support algorithm for trauma care was, not surprisingly, also a pilot!”

Smiling alongside his colleague, Solberg added that the interprofessionalism of the course – pairing aviation students with medical students – “is what higher education is all about.”

“When I hit the button on the smoke generator and thick white smoke surprised the student pilots by wafting up from under their seats to simulate an aircraft fire after landing,” Solberg said, “that’s when it hit them that this is a very real training exercise and I think they all felt a sense of responsibility to be prepared to care for themselves, and especially their passengers.”

Student response

This tug of responsibility in a fast-moving event is exactly what UND’s medical students are conditioned to respond to – particularly those drawn to emergency medicine.

And that’s why both Solberg and Reisenauer were keen to loop SMHS medical students into the workshops.

One of those students was fourth-year med student Bo Lauckner, who was on-hand at UND’s Robin Hall that day to help teach aviation students.

“Emergency medicine is a lot of ‘planning for the worst, hoping for the best,’ and I think it’s important for me to help teach people what to do should the worst happen,” explained Lauckner, who is headed to St. Louis, Mo., in June to begin an emergency medicine residency. He was among the seven SMHS medical students helping train the 30 SAS aviation students who had registered for the workshop.

“I learned just how much UND aviation students do not have in terms of medical equipment on their flights and their overall lack of extensive emergency medical training,” Lauckner said. “We talked to them about the things that we recommend when they are flying personally and where to find these resources at low cost.”

Wilson’s aviation students agreed.

“I learned an abundance about wilderness survival, some of which I had never considered as a pilot before,” said aviation management major Sadie Blace. “I appreciated the real life, scenario-based training and will remember the experience throughout the duration of my professional career.”

Commercial aviation major Ishir Agarwal likewise called the seminar “life-changing.”

“This experience could be the difference between life and death when confronted with an airplane accident,” Agarwal said, “and the specialists who took the time to train us were unbelievable.”

Center for Aerospace Medicine

For the faculty involved in the project, this first-ever partnership between UND’s aerospace and medical colleges couldn’t have come at a better time.

The SMHS Wilderness Medicine Interest Group had just spent a month learning about wilderness medicine across North Dakota, said Solberg. In addition to training for emergency medicine in cold weather conditions, the group’s training included learning how to respond to altitude-induced hypoxia – or low oxygen levels in the blood and brain.

“We were in UND’s altitude chamber last night where students got to ‘go’ to the top mount Everest and feel what it’s like to breathe there and experience that lack of oxygen,” Solberg said. “The aviation school has something that our students want to learn, and now we have something that they want to learn. It works out well.”

To that exact point, Wilson added, the North Dakota Legislative Assembly recently passed — and Governor Kelly Armstrong signed – a bill (HB 1612) to establish the North Dakota Center for Aerospace Medicine, to be based in the SAS. Along with facilitating such partnerships such as the one described, the Center’s mission will be to provide mental health support and certification assistance to UND students especially. It will also help aviation medical examiners like Reisenauer navigate
federal regulations.

Advocating on the bill’s behalf is Elizabeth Bjerke, associate dean and professor in the School of Aerospace Sciences.

“The aviation accident survival course is an excellent example of the different types of synergies we are hoping to expand as part of a North Dakota Center for Aerospace Medicine that leverages the expertise and interests of various colleges across campus,” said Bjerke. “After seeing first-hand the uniqueness of this course and the active learning environment, my main desire is that we expand its offerings in the future and make it available to pilots throughout the state of North Dakota.”