Jeffrey T. Tolbert

Record-breaking pilot and pioneering AirMed Founder, President and CEO, Jeffrey Tolbert may be the world’s top aviation expert in critical care transport.

A licensed pilot by 17, he passed the commercial exam on his 18th birthday and started his first air charter service ­­­­­­­­­­­– all while majoring in transportation at the University of Alabama.

After earning a Bachelor of Science degree, Tolbert named his growing charter business JETCO, which included transporting human transplant organs. When the University of Alabama School of Medicine’s (now known as UAB) hospital was preparing to perform the very first heart transplant in the South, Tolbert was asked to fly the donor (still on life support hundreds of miles away) to the critically ill 13-year-old recipient.

After that successful mission, Tolbert refocused part of his business as an air ambulance company, and in 1983 became the first in North America to use jets exclusively for medical transport. He soon began a fee-based global ambulance service, flying his first international critically ill patient from Pittsburgh to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia in 1988. 

Then Tolbert got a call from a distraught father whose son was severely injured in the mountains of Afghanistan while on a photo assignment for National Geographic. When the transport home to Cincinnati almost bankrupted the family, he came up with his revolutionary idea behind the membership concept for air medical services.

Basing his plan on a successful Swiss model, Tolbert persuaded Lloyd’s of London underwriters to support the first-ever American membership for U.S. travelers, who paid an annual fee for specialized medical transport if hospitalized more than 150 miles from home –– with no medical necessity restriction. That program continues today as AirMed Traveler and offers affordable air ambulance memberships to citizens in the U.S. and Canada with plans to expand into Asia and perhaps other countries as well.

Tolbert and his medevac team have since flown thousands of missions on six continents, and on April 9, 2002, Captain Tolbert also set the new world record for a nonstop flight in a Boeing 737, logging 6,854 nautical miles in 14 hours 12 minutes.

He has served as the Chairman of the Alabama Aviation Hall of Fame since 1999, and is currently helping to rewrite the FAA’s regulations governing air medical transports. Tolbert, AirMed, and the staff he has assembled have been the recipients of numerous awards and accolades throughout the air ambulance industry since the founding of the company.