and mainland US. The Army Air Corps established Medical Air Evacuation Squadrons (MAES) staffed by nurses and medics who were trained to provide care to patients on air evac missions; in 1942 the Army School of Air Evacuation was established at Bowman Field in Louisville, Kentucky. The School of Air Evacuation was transferred to be part of the School of Aviation Medicine in 1944, now called the United States Air Force School of Aerospace Medicine (USAFSAM) currently located at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio. Aeromedical evacuation personnel continue to be trained at USAFSAM at present. The US Navy joined the mission in 1944 by using various seaplanes and PB4Y aircraft to fly patients from remote Pacific islands to larger bases and on to stateside hospitals. By the war's end more than 1.3 million patients had been transported worldwide, with fewer than 60 inflight deaths. In the postwar era a system of intratheater evacuation was established in the US and Europe, with the establishment of the US Air Force in 1947 came the formation of the Military Air Transport Service (later Military Airlift Command and now Air Mobility Command) and a designation as the prime responsibility for the air evac mission. During the Korean War the Army began using helicopters for transporting casualties from the battlefield to rear area hospitals and MASH units, Air Force C-47s were then used to fly patients to large airfields where they were later transported on to Japan, Hawaii and the US by C-54 and also newer C-97, C-121 and C-124 which could carry up to 127 litters or a combination of up to 200 litter and ambulatory patients. By July 1953 310,000 patients had been transported both within and from the Korean peninsula. In 1954 the Air Force received its first dedicated AE platform, the C-131 Samaritan, which could carry 27 litter patients and had a range of 1500 miles, it was later supplemented with the MC-118 and in 1968 by the C-9 Nightingale, a modified version of the DC-9 commercial airliner. A rapidly expanding system of regular air evacuation flights throughout the world was established and tactical evacuation from battlefield areas was improved by the addition of new transport aircraft such as the C-123 Provider and C-130 Hercules. The first Air Force Reserve and Air National Guard AE units were established in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the Air Force entered the jet