Transporting patients by air can be expensive, but it often the only option. There are various medical situations where nothing else will do. Under ideal circumstances, the possibilities of in-flight medical care cannot be matched by other modes. Apart from the speed factor, air transport allows for a far larger complement of medical staff and services to be made available to the patient.

Medical air transport is usually called for emergency rescue and providing specialized but locally unavailable medical treatment (including chemotherapy, life support, dialysis etc.) Modern medical procedures such as organ transplantation also require the fastest possible means of bringing the patient and the source together.

Whatever the circumstances may be, medical air transport is not simply a matter of speed. Considering the fact that only serious medical situations call for it, a medical air transport craft must necessarily feature the very best that the profession has to offer. In operational mode, a fully facilitated craft will have doctors, nurses, paramedical personnel, a complete array of life support equipment and an arsenal of drugs on board.

Staff on medical air transport craft are specially trained for the task. This is why personnel must qualify for the job and are selected on the basis of certification. One will find professional personnel such as advanced life support critical care flight paramedics, board certified emergency medicine flight physicians, flight respiratory therapists and the like on the force. The kind of staff made available on any given craft depends on the medical situation - a cardiac arrest emergency will obviously call for different specialists than a third-degree burn case.

Apart from emergency services, medical air transport also makes the facilities of evaluation and diagnosis available to people who would otherwise have no access to it. One typical instance would be Australia, where the Flying Doctors are an essential part of the country's medical infrastructure.