Flight For Life moved into their new northern base of operations at the Hartford Municipal Airport. “We’ve obviously already served in Washington County for the past 38 years from different locations, whether it was Fond du Lac or Waukesha,” said Flight For Life Public Information Officer Scott Rinzel. “The move to Hartford really allows us to get closer to the communities that are really utilizing our service.”
He added that Flight For Life conducted a study to identify locations for a northern base, and Hartford made perfect sense.
“We’re very excited to be working again with Flight For Life,” said Hartford City Administrator Steve Volkert. “It’s not as though they actually went away, their competition came into the market and established some facilities here in Hartford, had bought the hangar and brought in the living quarters. We worked with them on that, and when they found out, after several different major issues, that they were not going to be able to occupy Hartford as much as they expected to because of the amount of calls.”
Volkert added that it is exciting that Flight For Life will be coming to the area to continue helicopter services in the area.
Director of Public Works and Hartford Municipal Airport Manager Darryl Kranz echoed Volkert’s sentiment that it is exciting to have Flight For Life operating out of the airport.
“It’s a great benefit for the residents in Hartford and the surrounding area to have that type of service so close,” said Kranz. “And, that was their goal, to get more locally out to the north so they can respond faster and get to these incidents, and it’s not always accidents that they respond to but hospitals to transfer patients and things like that.”
Flight For Life’s competitor, Air Methods, had previously operated Lifenet Hartford out of the Hartford Municipal Airport. When they were looking to leave the base, Flight For Life took it off their hands.
According to Rinzel, when Flight For Life had one base of operations, Waukesha made sense as a central location in the southeastern Wisconsin area.
Now that they opened a base of operations in Burlington that can serve more of the southern area in the region last year, it made sense to hop on the opportunity to open a base in Hartford to serve the northern area in the region.
“We had worked with Air Methods, not on this project, but previously for years and years and years,” said Rinzel. “We parted ways with them probably four or five years ago, and they opened [the Hartford] base. When they decided to close that base of operations, it was just a good opportunity for us to come in and get to the area that we originally wanted to.”