On Friday 26th November 2010, Richard and Mike from Freewheelers joined the morning assembly at All Hallows. They presented the school with a glass trophy, laser engraved with a three-dimensional Freewheelers logo, as a thank you for the hard work done by the school's pupils, parents and staff in raising money to buy The Flying Crane. Mike also gave the pupils an update on what The Flying Crane had done since it started blood bike duty on Thursday 1st July.

Since we put the bike on the road we have done almost exactly 12,000 miles on the bike - that's an average of 570 miles per week, or 82 miles per day. Freewheelers' volunteer riders split each week up into two separate shifts. The weekend shift runs 24 hours a day from 7:00pm on Friday evening right the way through to 7:00am on Monday morning, as well as bank holidays and Easter, Christmas and New Year. The weekday shift runs through the night from 7:00pm to 7:00am, Monday to Thursday. We have done 21 weekend shifts totalling 299 calls - an average of 14 calls per weekend, the least was 9, the most was 22! We have also done 22 weekday shifts totalling 126 calls - an average of 6 calls per week, the least being 4 the most being 8.

Our average fuel cost has been 11 pence per mile at an average of 12 miles per litre - that's 54 miles per gallon. Adding maintenance & tyres (£1,045 total to date), insurance and road tax brings the running cost up to 25 pence per mile. At the current rate The Flying Crane will do 30,000 miles in its first year so that's a total cost of £7,500 to run the bike.

During the past few months we have had some interesting incidents. One of our riders, Bill who is a retired RAF Pilot, came across a serious road accident while out on duty on The Flying Crane. The policeman who was attending the accident flagged Bill down and asked him to sit on his bike, near the scene of the accident, with his flashing blue lights turned on to warn oncoming vehicles of the hazard. On another weekend, The Flying Crane was called out three times to Frome Community Hospital to pick up blood samples from a very sick newborn baby that needed to go to the pathology laboratory at the Royal United Hospital in Bath, using blue lights and sirens. The nature of our work means that we rarely get to know what happens to any patients that we help, so we pray that the baby was OK and thank the school for providing the bike so that we could help her.