Grant Fletcher, a former rancher/farmer southeast of Taber, Alta., passed away this summer at the age of 84. Loved ones and friends recently shared their memories of Fletcher, the most notable of which were all the lives he helped save as a founding medivac pilot with HALO Air Ambulance, flying its very first mission back in 2007.

“He did a lot of things very, very well. He was a farmer, rancher and a pilot for a very long time. HALO gave Grant purpose for the last 16 years (in retirement) and that really hit home with me. We’re a very small program, very close knit, and HALO has a culture that kind of grabs a hold of you because of the people,” said Paul Carolan, chief executive officer for HALO, as Grant’s son shared stories with him at his memorial.

“Even when he stopped flying, he was still flying remote controlled planes. He just loved that side of things, the engineering, the technology, the wide open skies. He was a pilot through and through his entire life. We were very fortunate to have him as part of the program. We will be forever grateful.”

Fletcher officially hung up his HALO helmet at 82 years old, making him the oldest licensed commercial helicopter pilot in Canada. His aviation career spanned 66 years, after getting his pilots licence at 16, through the air cadets and Lethbridge Flying Club. That was at a time when you could rent a plane for $12 a day.

Fletcher ranched cattle and horses in the 1970s after returning home from Newfoundland. He primarily farmed grain and dryland crops through the 1980s and 90s until launching Fletcher Harvesting, which led custom combining crews from Oklahoma to Alberta.

As a commercial pilot, Fletcher’s travels saw him in spray planes and charter flights, manning helicopters fighting forest fires, wildlife surveillance and transporting patients during his time in Newfoundland, and oil work in Inuvik, NWT.

“Farming and flying were both professions he was very passionate about and proud of. It was important to him to get a good crop off properly at harvest to help the farmers and provide for others,” said granddaughter Stacy Peleskey in a family statement to the Western Producer, with Grant and late wife Marilyn having three children, and numerous extended family in the Alberta region.

“Flying for HALO meant so much to him. He really believed in what they they were trying to establish with local medical service for rural families in his home area. While he loved to fly and be part of these important missions, he would always credit the paramedics for saving lives.”

Fletcher’s HALO contributions went past flying helicopters, according to operations manager Ryan Shrives. He kept the wheels turning in every way, from fixing tractors and mowing lawns to plowing snow and tinkering with whatever needed a hand around the hangar — he led by doing.

“Whether it was hangar maintenance or simply making things better, Grant never sat still and never said no to a job worth doing. He was a gentleman-cowboy — boots and buckle polished, wit sharp, heart wide open. Whether it was rodeo stories, rescue missions, or crew room coffee banter, Grant was always up for a yarn and a laugh. He wasn’t just part of the team, he was the soul of it,” said Shrives, a HALO captain, in his social media submission The Concrete in the Cockpit.

“His contributions saved lives. His character shaped HALO. His presence — kind, calm, and unwavering — lifted us all.”

Fletcher would stay in Medicine Hat two weeks at a time on duty with his RV trailer, waiting at the hangar for the next call to come. The southern Alberta farmer would average about five calls a week, which he noted in his memoirs would take him from the Saskatchewan border, across the province, down to the Montana border and up to Hanna.

Before the GPS even finished calculating, Fletcher’s knowledge of the lay of the land and his rural neighbours was indispensable in what was a strength and a hardship emotionally at the same time.

“As a paramedic, firefighter, medivac pilot, you might be very familiar landing at someone’s home, a family member, a neighbour, someone you’ve known your whole life. Grant was very familiar with the area,” said Carolan, adding that Fletcher would fly with a steady hand among the chaos, with urgency, clarity and compassion.

“I was on a search-and-rescue mission with Grant in the helicopter once where I was in the back and he was in the front. I was to communicate the co-ordinates and on the intercom he literally said ‘whose farm is it?’ and next thing you know we were overhead and he knew exactly where to go. His familiarity with the community and the navigation to those locations was invaluable to us, but also weighed heavily knowing those people and the families. Grant went to a lot of calls with us and saw everything.”

In 2024, HALO renamed its annual fundraising event to the Grant Fletcher HALO in the Hangar.

HALO Air Ambulance is southern Alberta’s only dedicated Helicopter Emergency Medical Service Program. Since 2007, HALO Air Ambulance has flown thousands of missions to many rural, hard-to-reach areas. Partnering with regional and provincial stakeholders, HALO responds to a variety of calls for services including; emergency medical scene calls, critical care inter-facility patient transfers, search and rescue, fire rescue, law enforcement incidents and all-hazard disaster responses.

A paramedic who flew missions with Fletcher shared a ranching metaphor of the southern Albertan to HALO, in the heart and dedication he gave flying for the rescue organization.

“Grant can be compared to my faithful rope horse. Easy-going, but when work had to be done, you can count on him to get it done properly. Even in the most challenging conditions, Grant would always bring a calm and level-headed approach.”

The post Tributes soar for HALO founding pilot Grant Fletcher appeared first on Alberta Farmer Express.

“There’s 60 per cent more calls for 911 today than we were seeing about 10 years ago,” said Mike Parker, president of the Health Sciences Association of Alberta, the union representing paramedics.

“But now we’re down to zero available resources — zero paramedics in regions that are already not receiving an equal level of response.

“And when seconds matter, the ambulance isn’t 10 or 15 minutes away. It’s an hour away.”

That’s far more than elsewhere, said the president of the Alberta Paramedic Association.

“In rural EMS systems in other jurisdictions, 22 minutes would be the maximum people would have to wait for an ambulance, and even that seems like a long time,” said Dusty Myshrall. “In Alberta, we’re not even keeping up to those numbers for response times. We’re off the charts.

“In a world where minutes make a difference in whether someone lives or dies, that’s going to have a substantial impact on the outcome of patients.”

That’s a result of an increase in calls, said an Alberta Health Services spokesperson.

“EMS continues to see an unprecedented increase in emergency calls due to several combined factors, including the COVID-19 pandemic, opioid concerns, and emergency calls related to people returning to regular levels of activity,” AHS said in a written statement.

“Despite this historic increase in demand, EMS continues to respond to the vast majority of serious 911 calls quickly and appropriately. We are ensuring that the most critical patients are prioritized for receiving immediate care.”

There are a number of other factors at play, Myshrall and Parker said.

One is the province’s centralized health-care system, which sends ambulances from smaller communities to urban centres if they are the closest available unit.

“The problem is that the closest available units aren’t close anymore,” said Parker, adding ambulances 50 or 100 kilometres away are often called to respond to an urban call.

Occasionally it’s even longer, Myshrall said in an interview late last month.

“Just yesterday, there was an ambulance travelling almost two hours across Alberta to get to a call in Calgary,” he said. “That means every community between there had no ambulance available. That’s just a sample of what happens here on a daily basis now.”

Code red

In the past, the health-care system “would do anything it could” to keep ambulances staffed and in service, he added.

“Now, it’s become acceptable that ambulances are just out of service,” said Myshrall. “The public doesn’t know about that. It’s not like a brick-and-mortar hospital where you can see the lights are on or off.

“You don’t know there aren’t any ambulances in your community until you dial 911 and are waiting 45 minutes for help.”

A decade ago, a ‘code red’ — when there are no available ambulances — would only happen “once in a blue moon” but it’s now a daily occurrence, said Parker.

“The system is designed for each area to have appropriate resources, but if the ambulance that’s assigned to that rural community is now moved down into a larger community, that leaves the entire area vulnerable,” said Parker.

“There’s no way that a Coaldale or a Canmore or a Westlock ambulance should be doing calls in Edmonton. The system isn’t designed for that. They belong in their community to be available for the people in need there.”

His union said this fall there were at least 135 code reds in a 50-day period from late August through mid-October. But it’s tricky to pinpoint just how often they are happening in rural communities. One town may be without an ambulance one day and another town a day later, but the cumulative effect is that resources are being drawn from rural Alberta to address ambulance shortages in urban centres.

“There’s a lot of media attention on the Edmonton and Calgary code reds, but we’re seeing those exact same situations happening every day in rural Alberta,” said Myshrall. “We see communities on a daily basis going without their ambulances.”

And while the pandemic has flipped Alberta’s entire healthcare system on its head, the current lack of resources is more systemic, he added.

“I think the pandemic has become an excuse for the failing EMS system,” said Myshrall.

“What the pandemic has done is just highlight the issues with the system as it was failing. We saw this trajectory years before we ever got to this point.”

Parker agrees.

“The government has said things like, ‘It’s really hot. It’s really smoky. There’s COVID. Opioid overdoses. Alberta being open again,’” he said. “Every time we raise the issue, it has a new justification for why it takes an hour for an ambulance to get to your call.

“But when you see we’ve added zero additional resources — and in some cases have removed resources — we come up with a system that just cannot keep up with the call volume.”

‘Clear and present’ risk

Another issue is that EMS services used to simply provide emergency response to 911 calls, but has become “an extension of health care,” said Myshrall.

“Because we’ve centralized our health-care model, a lot of patients coming into rural hospitals have to be transferred to the city by an ambulance,” he said. “They can’t just drive themselves to the city — they have to go by ambulance once they’re through the emergency department. That stretches our resources even thinner.”

Another problem is how shifts are set up. Although it can vary, paramedics are generally on call 24-hours a day for a four-day period, then off shift for four days.

That may have worked when call volumes were much lower, but now “these ambulances are going non-stop,” said Myshrall.

Once a crew is on task for 14 hours, it’s automatically taken out of service for an eight-hour rest period.

“When that ambulance comes out of service, it can’t respond to anything,” he said. “In fact, they won’t even know that a 911 call came in. Someone could be two houses down from where that ambulance is parked and that ambulance can’t respond to them because it’s out of service for eight hours.”

This “archaic staffing model” leads to burnout that puts both paramedics and the public at risk, said Myshrall.

In August, Alberta Health Services said it would provide $8.3 million to “stabilize staffing” at EMS because of high call volumes. But it only moved people from temporary positions to full-time ones.

“There’s not one additional paramedic getting into an ambulance today,” said Parker. “We’ve been talking about this for 10 years. Successive governments have not addressed this issue. Nobody has taken a serious look at what’s happening.”

And if more paramedics aren’t hired, the problem will worsen as ones on the job become burned out and leave, said Myshrall.

“And then just like in the city centres, people are going to have to wait for an hour for an ambulance to show up,” he said.

“The risk is clear and present,” added Parker. “It’s not even a risk for the future — it’s a reality of today. When you dial 911, the closest ambulance isn’t close.”

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