With business booming on its all Piper fleet, Oxford, UK-based Air Med is taking on a new operations assistant Laura Church to join operations manager Mark Green and operations officer Glenn Salt. The company hopes that the move will free up more time to promote its air ambulance and air taxi work and to plan further fleet expansion.\r"Over the past six months we had noticed that the workload for Glenn and I had increased to such a level that we needed additional help," explained Green. "We have part use of a Citation I for air ambulance and air taxi that we will need to be marketed and with the additional help in the office I hope to free some time to enable me to do this."\rHe attributes the growth in business to the recent addition of a second newly-refurbished Chieftain to the company fleet and a subsequent marketing drive. "We are hammering last year's figures jobwise - last month alone we carried out nearly 120 jobs which with a fleet of six aircraft is very good," he points out, adding that this figure has been achieved despite one aircraft often being out of action for scheduled maintenance work.\rEBAN asked the company how it went about marketing the aircraft. "We push the economy side of things," came the reply. "We accept, as the industry does, that the Chieftain is a good way of getting a reasonable number of people to a destination at a very good cost per head," outlined Green. The difference for Air Med is that they also like to place emphasis on transporting passengers in 'relative luxury' and this is borne out by the configuration of the latest Chieftain.\r"The aircraft was acquired last year and has spent the best part of six months in the shed being resprayed. We've spent about £50,000 on the cosmetics of the aircraft - we've given it a full leather interior with beautiful upholstery," claims Green. The work was carried out at Oxford Aviation Services who are Air Med's designated maintenance organisation. A recent investment in part use of a Citation I with Oxaero is viewed by Green as a way of testing the water before then maybe committing to acquiring an aircraft of their own within a year. Part of that investment has been the fitting of a LifePort system on the aircraft, which, he claims, allows a patient to be loaded onto the aircraft one-handed.\r"We are the first to have the Citation I approval and we spent a lot of time and effort to get the CAA approvals for the Citation I fit." He is confident that the aircraft will prove popular and any future acquisition will complement the existing fleet of two Chieftains, two Seneca IIs and two Seneca IIIs.\r"We are turning away Chieftain work so we are looking at increasing the fleet again with perhaps another Chieftain," said Green. The company is also considering adding a Citation of its own in the next twelve months.