For some people living in country areas of Australia, the nearest doctor or hospital might be hundreds of kilometres away. Before telephones were widely available, it was nearly impossible to get medical help in an emergency in the outback. When stockman Jimmy Darcy was injured in a riding accident in a remote part of Western Australia, for example, it took two weeks for the doctor from Perth to reach him, only to find that he had died the day before. John Flynn, who was a Presbyterian missionary and clergyman, heard about Darcy’s case, and had a vision of a ‘mantle of safety’ for the people of the outback. They needed to be able to contact a doctor, and the doctor sometimes needed to be able to come to them if it wasn’t enough to prescribe treatment over the radio. An engineer from Adelaide designed a pedal wireless that was cheap, lightweight and easy to use – all you had to do was pedal with your feet and you could generate enough electricity to send a message in morse code from an isolated home. Qantas made an aeroplane available. In 1928 Flynn was therefore able to set up the Australian Inland Mission Aerial Medical Service at Cloncurry in Queensland. This was later called the Flying Doctor Service, and other similar organisations developed around Australia. Dr Kenyon Welch was the first flying doctor: in just the first year of the service he was on call night and day, he visited 255 patients and his pilot Arthur Affleck flew them about 32,000 km in 50 flights.