EVERY day on Wiltshire's roads there are people taking gambles with their lives.

Many win their bet with death and serious injury, but others pay a terrible price, and the cost for those caught up in it can also be high.

But the outcome for many of those involved in serious accidents would be much worse without the lifeline provided by Wiltshire's Air Ambulance.

A shared service with the police, and paid for by public donations, the helicopter is a familiar and reassuring sight in the skies over Wiltshire.

The highly trained paramedics, who are constantly on call for the most serious accidents in this county and on its borders, are often the difference between life and death for those injured on the roads.

Ironically but thankfully on the day the Wiltshire Times joined the air support unit's air operations manager Kevin Hitchens, on Tuesday the service had one of its quietest mornings in a long time.

Aviation restrictions make it impossible for anyone other than emergency service workers to fly with the helicopter, so Mr Hitchens took me out in one of the frontline response cars.

He said: "This is the most useful fast-response car in the service."

The car, which is donated by Causeway Saab in Chippenham, has been a godsend when weather or maintenance means the helicopter has been grounded.

Mr Hitchens said the car, which is based at Devizes with the helicopter, had helped paramedics save lives.

Ambulance technicians, clinical supervisors and paramedics aim to get to any life-threatening incident within eight minutes and the fast response vehicles help them achieve that.

Mr Hitchens still works on an operational basis.

He said: "At the scenes of accidents we are taking charge of people's lives and that's part of the clinical supervisor's role."

Clinical supervisors are carefully picked from the paramedics and act as anything from scene managers to counsellors.

It is not over-dramatising the situation to say that paramedics like Kevin Hitchens are making life and death decisions every day.

As soon as the air ambulance lands, the paramedic decides which person needs to be prioritised at the scene if there is more than one injured. He or she works with the ambulance crews who may already be at the scene, and with the other emergency services.

Mr Hitchens said seeing so many accidents had an affect on his own driving, and that even the training he has had as a professional driver had not make him complacent.

He said: "What people should realise is they should always expect people to do something you wouldn't expect them to do.

"People who overtake on zigzags or on solid white lines are not only breaking the law, but putting people's lives at risk."

He said it was very unusual to have had such a quiet shift fewer than 60 jobs in a 12 hour period.

"The night shift is the worst," he said. "It used to be that you could have a very quiet night on station; now it's unlikely you'll get more than one or two hours back at base during the shift."