Get to the choppah!

Here comes the IU LifeLine helicopter!

Starting back in 2013, something of an event has been made of the delivery of the green flag by helicopter.

It's been done by local professional athletes on the LifeLine helicopter as well as by fast-roping troops.

This year it was Hoosier health care heroes.

Following the little ceremony, the helicopter lifted right back off...

But it didn't fly far, setting down maybe a couple hundred yards away.

N195LL has a job to do at the track, being ready should someone need transport to the hospital. As a matter of fact, according to AviationDB, the 2008 MBB-BK 117 is registered at 109 Gasoline Alley.

Of course, the IMS is only a couple miles down the road from a Level One trauma center, so unless the helicopter's already on station it can be quicker to just throw a badly-injured driver in an ambulance and gun it for the ER, as happened to James Hinchcliffe when he took a piece of the car's suspension through his femoral artery during practice in 2015...

"What’s so fortunate about the whole situation was Indy is the closest track to a Level 1 trauma center of anywhere we that we run. Its four miles down the road on the same street. So they put me in the ambulance, they skip the infield medical center and just bee-lined it straight for the trauma center. In about five minutes I was there. Police escort, they shut the roads down in front and ambulance driver just gunned it. At this point they’re trying to get fluids through, because I’m bleeding profusely. They get me into the ER. They thought they kind of had the bleeding under control but my surgeon tells this story where he takes a step back from the bed and realizes that, he looks down, and under the bed was a pool of blood. I had bled through the gurney. So they bee-line me into one of the ORs and got in there and that’s when they found the artery and were able to stitch it up."