Tim Timmons, Medevac Pilot, in a 690B Twin Commander Search YouTube for videos on Twin Commanders, and one channel rises above the rest—Flying Wild AZ.
The channel is the work of Tim Timmons, a medevac pilot who flies a 690B for Ponderosa Aviation, based in Stafford, Arizona. Timmons is a former Army officer who got the flying bug while he was still in the military. “RC airplanes were the gateway drug,” he jokes. From there it was on to a private pilot certificate, which at the time he saw primarily as a hobby. It wasn’t until he was looking at retiring that he decided flying could be a career. After getting out in 2013 and spending a few years teaching at Cochise College in Douglas, Arizona, a former colleague brought him to Sunrise Air Ambulance, and the Twin Commander.
Guardian Flight purchased Sunrise and transitioned the fleet to King Air C90s, and “we didn’t want to fly C90s,” he said. So, Timmons and his mentor went to Ponderosa, a company with a long and storied history operating Twin Commanders. While most of the company’s fleet is dedicated to Air Attack missions all over the Western United States, the company owner, a doctor, believes it important to base a fixed-wing asset in rural Stafford in order to serve the local community. Timmons serves as one of its pilots, and its where he gathers all the content for the videos.
“I started using cameras in the cockpit before the GoPro came out,” he said. Today his set-up consists of four or five GoPros, an iPhone for recording in low light, and an audio adapter that connects to the co-pilot side. Timmons mounts everything with Ram mounts because they are strong, but easily removable. He edits with the Adobe suite, all of which is set up in the crew house.
The life of a medevac pilot is hours of downtime punctuated by periods of stress and high activity. Ponderosa’s medevac crews fly seven days on, seven days off, and the company provides a house to stay in while they wait for calls. Every other shift is a night shift, so essentially every month is a week of days and a week of nights. “It’s really feast or famine,” Timmons said. Some shifts won’t have any calls, and some will have up to three, which pushes up the limits of their duty day. Each shift begins at the airport with a preflight and a detailed weather check. Then it’s back to the house to wait, which leaves a lot of time to edit videos.
When a call comes in, Timmons said you can almost set your watch to the schedule. The patient shows up at the airport about 50 minutes after the call, which leaves time to get to the airport, change, pull out the airplane, update the weather, load the flight plan, and wait for the patient. Then it’s about 30 to 45 minutes of flying up to Tucson or Phoenix, where they’ll drop the patient, wait for the flight nurse and medic to return from the hospital, and then fly back to the base. He said it’s normally four hours from the time the call comes to when they return to the house again.
Flying Wild AZ details a lot of the type of flying Timmons does, as well as what it’s like to live a day in the life of a medevac pilot. The backdrop to it all is the 690B, an airplane he adores. Timmons didn’t have a lot of experience with twin turboprops when he began flying the Commander, but a recent training session in the King Air 250 gave him some perspective. “In the King Air you’re all over the place pressing buttons, but with the Commander it’s right where you want it,” he said. “I tell new pilots in the company that you’re going to have to force yourself to use the checklist because everything is so simple.”
His primary airplane is a Dash 10, and the power continues to impress him. “I could not believe how well the airplane performed when we shut down the engine in training. That really opened my eyes.” He said he also appreciates the immediacy of the power response in the TPE-331s compared to his experience flying the Pratt & Whitney PT-6 and turbojets.
“One thing I found from the videos is how huge the fan base is for the aircraft,” he said. “It’s a rare airplane and when we show up people are very interested. In the air it’s such a beast.”
Here are links to view some of the YouTube videos.
