Three people were killed when a medical evacuation helicopter crashed on Tucson's north side Wednesday afternoon.
Killed in the crash were the pilot, flight nurse and paramedic, said Air Methods, the Colorado-based company that operated the LifeNet medical helicopter. There were no patients aboard the aircraft, the company said.

A medical helicopter crashed on a Tucson street and burst into flames Wednesday, killing all three people aboard. A witness said the pilot steered the plummeting chopper away from a house.

Witnesses told The Arizona Daily Star the helicopter crashed into a fence in front of the house on Park Avenue just south of Glenn Street.

The helicopter was owned by Colorado-based Air Methods. Officials with the air ambulance company confirmed that the pilot, flight nurse and paramedic were killed in the crash of the AS350 B3 Eurocopter, which was not transporting a patient at the time.

Air Methods officials said the names of the victims would not be released until Thursday at the earliest.

UPDATE: The helicopter is owned by Colorado-based AirMethods. Company officials declined comment on the incident, according to the Associated Press.

Ricardo Carrasco told the Arizona Daily Star that he saw the helicopter's rotors stop working and the craft plummeted to the ground. He says the pilot managed to steer it away from the house.

One person was killed and and two are seriously injured in a helicopter crash on Tucson's north side this afternoon.
The helicopter smashed into a fence in front of a house on North Park Avenue just south of Glenn Street and burst into flames.
The LifeNet helicopter was an AS350 Eurocopter. There were three people on board.
The pilot was in contact with the control tower at Tucson International Airport at the time of the crash, but there was no indication of a problem, said an FAA spokesman Lynn Lunsford.
The aircraft was traveling from Marana to Douglas at the time and was not transporting a patient, he said.
Eyewitness Ricardo Carrasco said the helicopter's rotors stopped working and it started plummeting toward the ground.

A medical helicopter carrying three people crashed this afternoon on Park Avenue, south of Glenn in midtown Tucson. There is no immediate word on the fate of the people on board. The chopper crashed right behind a home and there were initial reports the crash set the home on fire, but fire officials later discounted that. Firefighters on the scene reported three people were on board the chopper.

Posted on July 28, 2010 at 3:07 PM
Updated today at 3:24 PM
A medical helicopter carrying three people crashed this afternoon on Park Avenue, south of Glenn in midtown Tucson. There is no immediate word on the fate of the people on board.
The chopper crashed right behind a home and there were initial reports the crash set the home on fire, but fire officials later discounted that.
Firefighters on the scene reported three people were on board the chopper.
There are reports the helicopter had just taken off from nearby University Medical Center.
An eyewitness told Fox 11's Brian Roberts he saw a black helicopter flying over his house. He heard the engines just shut off and then it crashed.

While hypothermia has been used during cardiac bypass since the 1950s, its use in the post-cardiac arrest setting had been unsuccessful until recently
By Jon C. Rittenberger, MD

Cardiac arrest is the most common cause of death in North America, resulting in approximately 350,000 deaths per year. For in-patients successfully resuscitated from out-of-hospital cardiac arrest, care is frequently withdrawn because of severe neurologic injury.

Consequently, survival following cardiac arrest is low nationwide, ranging from 3 to 16 percent. One potent therapy to reduce neurologic injury following cardiac arrest is therapeutic hypothermia — decreasing the body's temperature from 98.6° to approximately 91°F.

SANTA MARIA - They make night look like day and they can mean the difference between life and death. CALSTAR, an air ambulance non-profit organization with a base in Santa Maria, has new night vision goggles, or NVGs. The goggles amplify light up to 6000 times. They can use moonlight, even starlight.

This is preliminary information, subject to change, and may contain errors. Any errors in this report will be corrected when the final report has been completed.

On July 4, 2010, approximately 0015 central daylight time, a Cessna 421B, twin-engine airplane, Lifeguard N31AS, operated by O’Hara Flying Service, and doing business as Air Ambulance Stat, was destroyed when it impacted terrain 1.3 miles northeast of Alpine-Casparis Municipal Airport (KE38), Alpine, Texas.

BRISTOL — When there’s a bad accident — or an illness that takes a terrible turn — patients are sometimes flown from Bristol Hospital on a Life Star helicopter to a trauma center at a hospital in Hartford or elsewhere for treatment.