Barranfin / B47
Documented first uses of the helicopter for medical and rescue purposes:
First ‘MEDICAL SUPPORT’ Flights January 3, 1944
USCG flew plasma from the Battery in New York City to a hospital in Sandy Hook. Snow squalls and sleet had grounded all fixed winged aircraft and the plasma was badly needed for sailors injured in an explosion aboard the USS Turner. This initial "flight for mankind" was made by Cdr. Frank Erickson, USCG in the first operational model of the Sikorsky R-4 helicopter.
January 15, 1945, Bell Model 30 (prototype Bell 47) used by Floyd Carlson to fly a doctor to a farm house in Western New York. The doctor treated a Bell’s Chief Pilot Jack Woollams suffering frostbite after baling out of his crippled P-59 Airacomet jet.
(They weren't evacuation flights - and Carlson's evac flight was the second by a few weeks.)
First ‘MEDEVAC’ Flight January 1945
A Sikorsky YR-4 was dismantled at Wright Field (Dayton, Ohio) on January 17, 1945, loaded on a C-54 transport, and flown to the North Burma theater of operations. It was quickly reassembled and only nine days later, on January 26, 1945, Capt. Frank Peterson, AAF flew it to evacuate a wounded weather observer from a 4,700 foot mountain ridge in the Naga hills of Burma.
Peterson's YR-4, with escorting L-5, refueling enroute to mountain rescue - Chindwin River, Burma
Source data & 1/26/45 photo from de-classified AAF document, National Air & Space Museum archives.
This WWII combat zone mission is believed to be the first time a helicopter was actually used to rescue AND transport a trauma patient. Possibly Lt. Carter Harman, AAF, made a medevac flight near Mawlu, Burma on April 23, 1944. No official, documented source yet found to confirm.
First ‘RESCUE’ Flights March 14, 1945
Floyd Carlson flew a Bell Model 30 to rescue two commercial fishermen stranded on an ice flow in Lake Erie. The fishermen were ferried, one at a time, to shore.
April, 1945, the first large scale rescue occurred when the US Army and USCG teamed up to rescue nine downed Canadian airmen. Lt. August Kleisch, USCG flew a R-4 that had been airlifted to the area to extricate these men from snow drifts 180 miles south of Goose Bay, Labrador.
First ‘HOIST’ Rescue November 29, 1945
Sikorsky test pilot Jimmy Viner and Capt. Jackson Beighle, AAF (acting as hoist operator) used a R-5 with a new hydraulic hoist to lift two men from a large barge breaking apart in a storm on Penfield Reef off of Bridgeport, Conn.
Photo, from the Igor I. Sikorsky Historical Archives, Inc. web site, shows one of the barge's crew being lowered to the beach - the barge can be seen in the distant background.
When Igor Sikorsky's VS-300 experimental rotorcraft made it's first free flight in 1940, he is quoted as saying this new vehicle is for the "benefit of mankind". In just four years, this wish or prophecy became a reality.