SCOTT Bateman and Tim Ruscoe are pilots from RAF Lyneham who fly on the ground in their spare time.

When they are not in the air in their Hercules they are flying to the rescue in cars, as unpaid volunteers for the Wiltshire Ambulance Service.

Flt Lieut Bateman, 31, started the charity First Response five years ago after his father suffered a fatal heart attack.

"The response time of the ambulance was in excess of 15 minutes. "I felt that this delay was unacceptable and had it been much shorter my father may have survived the attack," said Mr Bateman.

He went to the NHS with the idea of using volunteers from the Armed Forces to provide a rapid responder service.

The scheme was launched in October 1998 at RAF College Cranwell in Lincolnshire.

Five years later and there are now eight NHS ambulance services that use the First Responder scheme.

Mr Bateman is serving at RAF Lyneham and while co-ordinating the charity across the country he still finds time to go to emergency calls on a regular basis.

"Our role is to help the ambulance service which is very stretched. We go straight in there and deal with the situation before the ambulance gets there.

"This saves valuable time and we pass over to the ambulance as soon as it arrives and are straight out on to the next job.

"We only go to emergency calls which means, unlike the ambulance, we don't get tied up at hospitals for hours.

"We do make a tangible difference to people's lives," said Mr Bateman.

Last Friday night Mr Bateman was out in a customised car with colleague Flt Lieut Tim Ruscoe, 30. They worked a five and a half hour shift from 7pm to past midnight even though they were tired from flying back from Edinburgh the previous night.

Mr Ruscoe had just completed his week's training and it was his first night on the job.

"I was looking for something challenging, exciting and rewarding which was different to what I do.

"I was on an exercise with Scott in Cyprus and he told me about First Responders.

"It sounded like exactly what I was looking for and when we came back I went out with them for a night to see what I thought. It felt right straight away," said Mr Ruscoe.

But he admitted his first night on the job was nerve-racking, particularly under the watchful eye of the charity founder and a local reporter.

"We literally walked in the door at 7pm and we had to rush out to a job straight away. It was a road traffic accident and it was nerve-racking because we just didn't know what to expect.

"It could have been really bad, but fortunately it wasn't," he said.

Dennis Lauder, head of Wiltshire Ambulance Service, said he had great admiration and respect for the First Responder team.

"They help us significantly in meeting our response times and they are a really good team.

"Because of their disciplined background they work very well. They really put back into the community and are of a very high standard.

"And most importantly they help the patients significantly," he said.

lcanter@newswilts.co.uk