Tower Lotteries are honoured to have worked for The East Anglian Air Ambulance since 2010. Due to the endeavours of all concerned, their weekly lottery is now one of the biggest in the country and generates more than £4m a year for the charity and single-handedly funds one of the helicopters in the region.
The charity was launched in August 2000 by Andrew Egerton-Smith MBE and by January 2001 enough money had been raised to commission a Bolkow BK105 to fly one day a week from Norwich Airport. This increased to five days a week in March 2001 and then to seven days a week from July the same year. In August 2001 the charity launched its lifesaving lottery.
Such was the need for the service in the region, a new Bolkow BK117 was ordered from Germany in November 2006 as the number of missions done by the charity increased by over 20%. In April 2007, an appeal was launched to extend the service to cover Bedfordshire and just four months later a second Bolkow BK117 was in place to cover Bedfordshire and Cambridgeshire five days a week and this had been extended to seven days by the end of 2007.
In December 2010, paid Doctors from the NHS began to work on the helicopters. This gave the people of Norfolk, Suffolk, Cambridgeshire and Bedfordshire the best possible clinical service 365 days a year. In September 2012, A Eurocopter T2 with fully night-capable vision is delivered to Cambridge and a few months later the operating hours are extended to 07:00h to 23:59h every day of the year.
