Determining How Functional Characteristics of a Dedicated Casualty Evacuation Aircraft Affect Patient Movement and Outcomes

Abstract

Advances in autonomous aircraft technology are spurring research into the different roles these aircraft could fill. The Office of Naval Research (ONR) is pursuing an Innovative Naval Prototype of an autonomous cargo aircraft in response to a United States Marine Corps Universal Needs Statement. Since the use of such a vehicle to evacuate casualties after delivering supplies is an obvious extension, ONR initiated research into how the functional characteristics of an aircraft such as speed, range, capacity, and number available affect how the aircraft performs as a patient movement platform. To evaluate aircraft functional characteristics we executed experiments with a patient movement simulation that explicitly models treatment, evacuation, and mortality as patients flow from the point of injury through definitive care. The experiments provide data, which was used to develop a response surface model of estimated patient mortality as a function of the casualty evacuation system characteristics. This response surface will be useful for comparing competing systems when currently unknown constraints such as total cost of ownership, volume, area, and weight are applied.