By Roger Lytollis, UK Regional Feature Writer of the Year

Last updated 14:53, Friday, 24 October 2008

Carlisle Airport. That’s where Jim Martin wants to meet. It makes sense to see him here. This is where Cumbria’s air ambulance, which Carlisle-born Jim used to pilot all over the county, is based.

Jim Martin

But think for a moment about what he’s been through and the meeting place also seems like a statement of defiance. Two fingers to a bloody past which has seen him survive a plane crash and a helicopter crash, as well as a climbing accident in which a friend died.

A statement of intent as well. The two stairs at the end of the corridor leading to the airport café require careful negotiation as Jim balances a hand against the wall and slowly shuffles down. But he belongs here. And he will be back. As a pilot. He’s a determined man, is Jim.

Ten months ago. The day before New Year’s Eve. Jim is in a microlight plane enjoying a Sunday afternoon flight over Northumberland with his friend and air ambulance paramedic Jon Ker.

“Jon was flying at the time,” recalls Jim. “There was a bit of a thud and Jon said ‘This feels funny.’ I took the controls. It felt very sloppy. Then I saw the tailplane wobble and fly away. I said to Jon ‘We’re goosed now, Jonny Boy.’”

The plane lost power and nose-dived 800ft in eight seconds. Jim sent out a distress call and wrestled the controls to the right, towards a wood. They crashed into trees at 130 mph, flipped over and landed the right way up on a muddy riverbank.

Jon suffered severe brain trauma. The force of the impact snapped Jim’s seatbelt and threw him into the dashboard. “I had an inverted face,” he says. “Everything that sticks out was pushed in.”

Jim had fractured his skull and his eye sockets, broken his nose and jaw, snapped his teeth, ripped his left shoulder, smashed his left elbow, bashed his fingers and broken his left leg in two places. Only a flap of skin kept his right foot connected to his leg.

The men who spent their lives rescuing others were saved by an air ambulance from Teeside which arrived within half an hour. Jim had helped train the consultant who treated him.

Jon, whose brain injury was judged even more serious than Jim’s condition by the paramedics, was rushed to Newcastle General by the air ambulance. Jim was taken in Northumbria Police’s helicopter.

Nine hours of surgery helped save his life. But Jim was unrecognisable. The surgeon asked his wife Margaret to bring in photographs of her husband as a guide to what he was supposed to look like. The groove across the top of Jim’s head tells what happened next. The surgeon cut from ear to ear, peeled the patient’s face forward and did what he could to repair the damage.

The scars on his face and body are a map of how Jim fell to earth, and of where the screws, the plates and the 14 rods through his jaws were fitted. But the man in the airport café is unmistakably Jim Martin. In body and in spirit.

The crash happened just seven weeks after Jim returned to flying the county’s air ambulance, the Pride of Cumbria. He had been absent for almost two years following a previous accident with Jon Ker, this time on Ben Nevis.

In January 2006 they were climbing Britain’s highest mountain with their colleague and friend Dr Rupert Bennett. Jon was abseiling down when the boulder all three had attached themselves to came loose, sliding over the edge, pulling Jim and Rupert with it. Jon managed to cling to the rock face but his friends landed 100ft below.

While Jon raised the alarm Jim covered himself with a protective sheet and shivered on the freezing mountain. He had multiple fractures but he told himself not to swear. “If I die,” he thought, “I want to go to heaven.”

Jim was rescued after three hours by a Royal Navy helicopter. He spent five months in hospital and had eight operations on his broken leg, pelvis and wrist. Rupert had been lying nearby on the mountain. Jim knew that his friend had not survived.

There’s one more. Another Jim Martin great escape. In 1988 Jim was an RAF pilot. He was captain of a twin-rotor Chinook helicopter at an airshow in Germany. The Chinook was taxiing on the ground when marshals failed to notice that its rear blades were too close to an air bridge; the kind that links a departure lounge and a plane.

The blades hit the bridge, the front and rear blades collided and disintegrated, the helicopter flipped up, landed on the bridge and burst into flames.

“Nasty, that,” says Jim. One second he was sitting quietly, looking out of the window, and then... “My left side was on fire. The co-pilot was in flames next to me. He melted into the seat. The cockpit filled with flames and thick black smoke. I managed to get the seatbelt off and I hit the emergency exit door handle but it didn’t come off. I hit it with a karate blow and it flew off.

“I only fell three feet onto the air bridge. But it collapsed under my weight and I fell another 22 feet onto concrete.”

The last thing he remembers is lying on the ground as a doctor delivered a morphine injection.

Jim was in a coma for four days and suffered severe burns. The co-pilot and two other crewmen died.

Twenty years later in the aftermath of the microlight crash Jim wakes up in Newcastle General from another four-day coma.

He sees a nurse, asks for a piece of paper, and writes: “Am I still alive?” She replies “Of course you are, hinny.”

During his latest recovery Jim has joined the Friends of the Pride of Cumbria volunteers who aim to raise the £70,000 a month needed to keep the helicopter in the sky.

Great North Air Ambulance, which runs the Pride of Cumbria, receives no funding from the government, or anyone other than the thousands of Cumbrians who have given generously since it launched in 2004.

“Air ambulance saved my life, without a doubt,” says Jim. “Me and Jon were pouring blood in a wood. You’re not going to get a conventional ambulance in there.”

Jon is making a good recovery and has been up again in a microlight. Jim won’t go in one of those any more. He wouldn’t put Margaret through that, and he can remember what happened last time. Jon can’t. But Jim is determined to keep flying helicopters and his dream is to return to the controls of the Pride of Cumbria.

Although there’s a long way to go – at least one more operation, medicals to pass – he has flown since the microlight crash.

Three weeks ago he went up in a helicopter with friends and piloted it for 20 minutes. “I could have had a major wobble, flashbacks, but I didn’t. To me it’s like turning up at the office in the morning.”

The dream began when he was a 10-year-old in Stanwix watching the Red Arrows and it has survived all this, kept alive by the thrill of flight, by the knowledge that he has saved lives, by the flood of ‘Thank you’ and ‘Get well soon’ cards to his Hexham home.

Another coffee for Jim. He seems so... normal. You were expecting Superman and you get Clark Kent. This only makes it harder to understand why he has stared down the barrel three times and walked away when others have fallen.

Does he believe in fate? “I don’t know. I certainly believe someone’s looking after me. I’m lucky to be here. But you never cheat death. It’s a certainty.”

Lying in a coma after the Chinook fire, the last rites had been read for Jim Martin.

“I had a tunnel of white light,” he says. “It was all the people who’d been killed on the aircraft saying ‘Are you coming?’ I was going ‘What are you doing?’ They said ‘We’re going skiing.’ That’s what I used to love. ‘Are you coming?’ I could see an old-fashioned ward clerk. I looked at him and he shook his head. I said ‘I can’t go now. I have to stay here.’ ‘Ok, Jim.’ And off they flew.”

How often does he think about the friends he’s lost? “Every day,” says Jim. “They’re always there.”

For more information about the Pride of Cumbria and to make a donation visit www. greatnorthairambulance.co.uk