“It’s like driving down the highway and hitting a patch of ice and hoping your car stops before you run out of road,” he says. “It’s slippery and bouncy, and at first you’re not sure the airplane is going to stop—but you trust the crew and the training.”
Huhn caught our attention when he insisted on joining his Ted Stevens classmates remotely from a hospital bed on the last day of the course. Huhn is a flight nurse with the New York Air National Guard’s 109th Airlift Wing, the U.S. polar operations wing, and he jokes that his team are “truly bipolar Airmen,” supporting missions at both poles. He now serves the National Guard Bureau Readiness Program Training, responsible for the medical portion of major National Guard exercises—from aeromedical evacuation and critical care air transport to homeland response and disaster scenarios.
Huhn’s perspective is grounded in 32 years of service across the Navy, Army, and Air National Guard, including 19 years as a nurse in the aeromedical community. He wants future exercises to reflect degraded conditions: long distances over island chains, true Arctic operations beyond short hops within Alaska, and scenarios where resupply may be days away.
For Huhn, those environments are often remote, cold, and unforgiving. Working with Canadian partners in Resolute Bay and supporting Arctic advisor courses in Canada and other locations, his squadron developed “aeromedical considerations for Arctic transport,” tailored to moving critical patients hundreds of kilometers from the nearest runway or hospital.
That experience exposed gaps in traditional aeromedical doctrine, which assumed larger patient loads and easier resupply. His team began modularizing equipment—re-warming bags, portable suction, and core supplies—so a single clinician could deploy with a compact kit and still provide safe care. The Air Force has since incorporated many of these concepts into updated aeromedical evacuation procedures, adjusting equipment and crew configurations to better match real missions.
“It’s a bit of a Kobayashi Maru,” he says. “You won’t have unlimited resources. You do the best you can with what you have—and we need medics and nurses to think through that before they’re faced with it in the real world.”
