An hour matters.

Minutes count.

Time - health care officials say that's precisely what a new air ambulance at the North Bend Municipal Airport has taken away from them, in the rush to send trauma and other critical-care patients to bigger hospitals for intensive medical care.

And that, they say, is very good news.

"When you're looking at injuries that are life threatening, time is critical," said Bridget Berlin, Bay Area Hospital's Emergency Department manager.

People with serious head injuries, bleeding near their brains, or heart attack victims could benefit most from having the locally based service.

"This air ambulance could change the way we provide cardiac care to our patients," Berlin said this week.

Prior to October, Bay Area's emergency room teams stabilized such patients. Often they were loaded in ground ambulances and driven to Sacred Heart in Eugene.

In these cases, time dictates treatment.

If specialists got to a heart-attack victim within two hours, they could render different care than they would within the four-hour window, and so on. Basically, the sooner the care, the greater chance of minimizing damage, and, the greater chance of saving someone's life.

For people with head traumas, ER staff typically puts in a call to Life-Flight, based in Portland, to fly down a medical team to pick up the patient and return the person to medical specialists in Portland. Such turnaround can take up to four hours. Occasionally, due to fog, a plane can't even land.

But Emergency Airlift has cut the steps. Now, when Berlin's call goes out, it's local - to Bay Cities Ambulance, which sends a crew directly to ER. The paramedics pick up the patient and head to the airport. There is no briefing needed among personnel. The ground ambulance crew flies right along with the patient. On a recent head-trauma case using the new service, Berlin recalled, the turnaround time to care in Portland was just over two hours.

"That is phenomenal. It usually takes more than that to get a patient to Eugene," she said.

But, Emergency Airlift is not a public venture. It's a business.

And pilot Ed Langerveld is the energy behind it. He moved to Florence three years ago, after selling a corporate aviation agency based in Southern California. Langerveld could have started any business, but he wanted to provide a service to the community. Also, he had 15 years of piloting experience and two planes he wanted to put to use.

He did some research, built a 10,000-square-foot hangar in Florence and made a pact with Bay Cities Ambulance to provide the medical crews for the air ambulance.

"We think there's enough business. The statistics say there is," said Bay Cities Ambulance owner Bruce Latta.

Bay Cities staffs the air ambulance with two flight-certified paramedics and is in the process of hiring registered nurses. It takes specific training to care for patients aboard planes, for instance due to pressure changes that can affect medications and equipment.

Bay Cities operated such a service for about 15 years, up until five years ago, when low Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements forced Latta to park the plane.

But both Latta and Langerveld are optimistic the new venture will fly. From Oct. 1 through Wednesday, Langerveld had piloted seven flights.

"We need a minimum of six (per month) to make it in the long run," he said, adding he knew of four missed calls because hospitals didn't know about the service.

Langerveld parks his Turbo Commander 690 at North Bend, just minutes from the South Coast's largest hospital, but just as importantly it's a short ambulance drive away from three other community hospitals - at Bandon, Coquille and Reedsport. He's also optimistic he will be able to serve Florence and eventually Roseburg. And while he says he's not really competing with the Portland and Medford air ambulance services, Langerveld enjoys a competitive advantage being based in North Bend.

If the weather locally is below 3/4 of a mile visibility, those planes can't come here. But Langerveld can take off with 1/4-mile visibility.

But more than weather, time dictates the calls. Bay Area Hospital's Berlin says ER staff will make its decisions on how to send patients out based on the best and most expedient treatment. And Emergency Airlift just added one more time-saving option.

"I just think it's an asset to the community," she said. "It's truly beneficial to the community in how we provide care."