Luxembourg Air Rescue (LAR) has already flown almost 2,700 missions this year. These have included repatriations from abroad, the transport of organs and, of course, rescue helicopter missions when someone is in distress.
So far, its three helicopters have been used almost 2,100 times, and two brand new ones have been in use for a fortnight now, an investment of almost 14 million euros.
The organisation also bought a new aircraft this year, which is more suitable for repatriations from abroad. After all, it has to fly further to bring its members home in an emergency. In 2023, for example, they were in India, Nicaragua and the Antilles.
LAR finances its work partly by flying on behalf of assistance companies, which are also rather unusual missions. LAR president René Closter says:
“We recently flew to an island that is perhaps not so well known, the island of Saint Helena between Brazil and Africa, in order to rescue a woman who had her leg bitten off by a shark. We helped transport her to London.”
Equally intriguing is his anecdote detailing the time LAR transported a donor’s lung on Christmas Eve. Together with a partner in Lyon, LAR holds exclusivity for organ transport by air, which are missions dependent on quality of work and numbers of aircraft.
“An example are our patients who donate almost all their organs - from kidneys to lungs to heart to liver. In this case, up to four aircraft are sent to the site to transport all these organs. Of course, this requires precise planning: first we pick up the medical team, fly them with a freezer to the location where the organs are collected, and then we fly with the team and the organs to the location where the organ is transplanted.”
This year alone, the LAR organised 1,400 of these organ transport missions.
