• The air ambulance based at RAF Cosford is one of three. The others are at Strensham in Worcestershire and Nottingham East Midlands Airport. All the helicopters are leased.
• The service covers 11 counties, providing airborne ambulance cover for 7.8 million people.
• Although the helicopters do not receive any state or lottery funding, their lifesaving operations save the public purse huge amounts of money.
• The £1 million a year it costs to run each helicopter – raised entirely by the generosity of the public – compares to a cost to the NHS of over £1,144,000 for the death of a person under the age of 35 who is killed prematurely in an accident. A patient aged under 35 whose life is saved by the charity and subsequently returns to work will cost the state £128,650 – a saving of £1,016,000 of public money.
• The service saves one such patient approximately once every three weeks.
• In the 2004/5 year the charity had an income of £4,226,000. £79 of every £100 went directly on operating the service – the rest went on fundraising, marketing and pump-priming to secure future cash (14 per cent), and administration (seven per cent).

Mission log:

In 2006 the County Air Ambulance flew a total of 416 missions.

Most were to transport road accident casualties to hospital.

In a typical month (July), the breakdown was:

• Road accidents, 13
• Sport and leisure, 8
• Medical emergencies, 8
• Trauma, 0
• Falls, 6
• Industrial incidents, 0
• Agricultural incidents, 1
• Drowning, 0,
• Other, 0
• Hospital transfers, 1