Helicopter Rescue at Very High Altitude: Recommendations of the International Commission for Mountain Emergency Medicine (ICAR MedCom) 2025
Bibliographic record
Abstract
McLaughlin, Kyle, Charley Shimanski, Ken Zafren, Ian Jackson, Gerold Biner, Maurizio Folini, Andreas Hermansky, Eric Ridington, Peter Hicks, Giacomo Strapazzon, Marika Falla, Alastair Hopper, Dave Weber, Ryan Jackson, and Hermann Brugger. Helicopter rescue at very high altitude: recommendations of the International Commission for Mountain Emergency Medicine (ICAR MedCom) 2025. High Alt Med Biol. 27:107–116, 2026. Background: Helicopter mountain rescue is highly effective. However, air rescue operations at very high altitude (VHA), above 3500 m, are inherently hazardous because of challenging topography, dynamic weather, and hypobaric hypoxic environment. Currently, no established international guidelines exist for helicopter rescues at VHA. Methods: We conducted a narrative review of existing literature, supplemented by expert opinions from helicopter pilots, physicians, and rescuers actively engaged in VHA rescues. These recommendations were approved by the International Commission of Alpine Rescue (ICAR) Medical Commission and endorsed by the ICAR Air Rescue Commission. Discussion: We identified 19 key factors to consider, including operational parameters, ground site management, pilot and rescuer safety protocols, and psychological factors to assist air rescue programs in developing pre-mission, mission, and post-mission plans for helicopter rescue missions at VHA. Conclusions: By implementing the recommendations outlined in this article, helicopter rescue teams operating at VHA can improve response capabilities and minimize risks.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".