page_title: Raid on Bir el Hassana
section_title: Aeromedical evacuation
hierarchical_section_title: Raid on Bir el Hassana / Aeromedical evacuation
context_page_description: The Raid on Bir el Hassana occurred in the Sinai Peninsula in February 1917, during World War I. It was a minor action between an augmented battalion of the Imperial Camel Corps on the one side and a score of Turkish troops plus some armed Bedouin on the other. The raid occasioned the first aeromedical evacuation in the British Army.
  The raid was the third of three actions fought by British forces seeking to recapture the Sinai Peninsula during the Sinai and Palestine Campaign of World War I. Egyptian Expeditionary Force cavalry and camelry traveled into the centre of the Sinai Peninsula to attack and push the last Turkish garrisons back into Palestine.
context_section_description: On 19 February the Royal Flying Corps flew McGregor out with his leg in a box splint, while he sat in the observer's seat of a Royal Aircraft Factory B.E.2c, a two-seater biplane. This was the first use of aeromedical evacuation by the British. The flight to El Arish took 45 minutes. The alternative to aeromedical evacuation was a cacolet (a type of litter) on a camel, which one historian described as "a form of travel exquisite in its agony for wounded men because of the nature of the animal's movement". Travel by cacolet would have taken days.
caption: A B.E.2c at the Imperial War Museum in London.
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