Pilot Nigel Findley was not anticipating any rapid return to the skies as he left Luton Airport to drive to his home near Wantage. Having flown easyJet passengers back from Budapest he was approaching Leighton Buzzard in good time.

But the second half of the journey was to be completed in little more than ten minutes. For he was destined to arrive in Oxford in a helicopter that carried his shattered body to the John Radcliffe Hospital.

The high-speed, head-on crash left him with a ruptured intestine and badly damaged legs. His condition as he was being cut from his car led the consultant who had arrived on the scene to come to an immediate conclusion: “It’s the air ambulance, or not at all.”

Mr Findley, 49, who was conscious throughout the most important and agonising flight of his life, said: “It was definitely touch and go. If I had gone by road to the nearest hospital, I would not have made it. There are some accidents that are time-critical, where the air ambulance makes the difference between a full or partial recovery, or no recovery at all.”

That was almost two years ago, and Mr Findley, having passed his medical, has been able to return to full-time flying. The pilot has also become one of the most impressive figures to speak up for the air ambulance service, even washing cars in his village to raise £3,320 to help keep it airborne.

For 18 months now the air ambulance service, covering Oxfordshire, Berkshire and Buckinghamshire, has been operating from RAF Benson, having moved there from its former home at White Waltham, near Maidenhead.

The old Bolkow helicopter has been replaced with a new C135 Eurocopter, an altogether faster model, which became operational in the summer.

Since the service began in 1999, it has flown more than 10,600 missions, with about 100 flown over Oxfordshire since the new helicopter took to the skies.

The air ambulance is funded solely by public donation, receiving no money from central government or the National Lottery.

And yet in Oxfordshire it has never been a charity to attract universal affection, despite the ongoing efforts of the Thames Valley & Chiltern Air Ambulance Trust to raise the charity’s profile locally.

Oxfordshire continues to donate less than either Berkshire or Buckinghamshire and many people still regard it as a costly luxury, requiring £2m in public donations to operate, at a time when community hospitals are being closed and patients are still denied life-extending drugs. Others argue that the road network in Oxfordshire means ordinary ambulances can, in any case, reach all corners of the county quickly, with nowhere sufficiently remote to warrant the use of a helicopter.

Call-outs that have been made to more far-flung rural areas have often been to riders thrown off horses, involving painful but not life-threatening injuries.

It is also an emergency service that only operates during office hours. After 6pm, even during the height of summer, the new helicopter has to remain in its hangar.

Clearly, the fact that it began its life near Maidenhead has made it harder to sell as a worthy local cause to people in Oxfordshire. The distance to northern and western parts of the county from Berkshire removed the air ambulance’s one real selling point — speed.

Sadly, the fact that the service now operates from Benson, near Wallingford, has simply gone unnoticed by many people in Oxfordshire. The reorganisation which saw the local ambulance service absorbed into a giant South Central Ambulance Trust, also covering Berkshire and Hampshire, has hardly assisted the efforts to emphasise the local link with this particular emergency service.

It is against this background that the air ambulance trust has now come up with its Challenge Oxfordshire initiative in the hope of raising an extra £100,000 for the charity and attracting 100 volunteers.

To get the campaign off the ground, the trust organised a big launch in Carterton two weeks ago, when the Lord Lieutenant of Oxfordshire, Tim Stevenson, and representatives from local businesses, schools and clubs had the chance to talk to aircrew and former patients, including Mr Findley.

A similar event will be staged today in Bicester, with the helicopter moving on to Thame on March 14, Abingdon on March 18, Banbury on March 20, Wallingford on March 21 and Wantage on March 25.

To help raise the extra £100,000, the trust has turned to David Griffiths. Mr Griffiths showed his ability as a charity fundraiser during his many years as the area fundraising manager for the Royal National Lifeboat Institute.

Operating in a landlocked county posed no apparent difficulties for Mr Griffiths when he set himself the task of persuading the Oxfordshire public to donate £100,000 for an Atlantic 75 lifeboat. The Oxford Town and Gown was later presented to a lifeboat station at Whitstable, where it is still saving lives.

So, after buying a lifeboat for Kent, will not the the air ambulance appeal be plain sailing?

“Well you have to remember that in the early part of the charity’s history, the helicopter was based in Berkshire, where the brand identity remains very high,” said Mr Griffiths. “During that time, I feel we didn’t put enough of our resources into demonstrating how important the service is to Oxfordshire. Despite the helicopter being moved to RAF Benson in 2007, awareness throughout Oxfordshire is not as high as we would hope. The aim of this campaign is to put this right.”

He invited me to tour the air ambulance’s new home and meet members of the crew. Two members of the Castle Royle Golf Club in Berkshire were also there, underlying his point, in recognition of the £50,000 a year the club has raised over the years.

It turned out the air ambulance had gone to the aid of more than one golfer at the club to have collapsed with suspected heart attacks. Golfers, riders and, of course, drivers seem to place the biggest demands on the crew.

Those who imagine that consultants spend all their spare time on golf courses, should meet John Black, one of the five doctors who work unpaid for the air ambulance service.

Dr Black, a consultant in emergency medicine at the John Radcliffe, said he would dearly love to see the service’s hours being extended. But having doctors on call 24 hours a day would require NHS funding, he said.

“At the moment very few doctors are trained to provide medical support to the air ambulance service.”

He said advances in treating trauma, strokes and heart attacks meant it was ever more essential that patients were treated in the most appropriate, not necessarily nearest, hospital. Then there was the famous ‘golden hour’, the precious 60 minutes following a serious injury when casualties, if correctly resuscitated and treated, have the best chance of survival with minimum long-term disability.

The John Radcliffe, with an internationally-recognised trauma unit that continues to deliver some of the best survival figures for the most seriously injured, is inevitably the main destination. It also, unlike the main Reading hospital, for instance, has a heliport.

He explained that the air ambulance was also used to transfer patients from one hospital to another specialist centre.

A five-year-old boy who had been waiting for a liver transplant was able to get to the hospital in quarter of an hour instead of two hours, when a precious organ recently became available.

The helicopter can also be used to get medical staff into emergency situations when roads and cities are completely clogged. With London paralysed by the 7/7 bombings, the air ambulance was used to carry Dr Black into the capital so he could help treat the victims of the explosion at Russell Square.

Ges Charlton, one of the two air ambulance pilots, says that, typically, the service receives about four or five calls a day.

The relocation to Benson means that any part of the county can be reached within 12 minutes.

Paramedic David Findlay joined us to proudly show off the new helicopter, which is leased, with the charity unable to afford the £3.5m price tag. He is one of 18 paramedics who work on a rotation basis.

As well as being faster, Mr Findlay gestures towards the extra seat, which may be filled by a specialist, a trainee or a parent wishing to travel with an injured child.

It turns out there is now a very exclusive Bob the Bear club for such youngsters. The bears, named after the initials of the charity’s rescue area — Berkshire, Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire — and the helicopter’s call sign, G-HBOB, is given to all children who have been airlifted.

The maintenance, fuel and running costs still leave the trust having to find £1.8m a year, or some £150,000 a month.

John Power, the former Oxford Lord Mayor who was a non-executive director of the county ambulance trust for seven years, continues to believe it simply costs too much.

“My own view is that it remains an expensive luxury, with the costs outweighing the benefits. People forget the revenue implications of the air ambulance. People raise money for the air ambulance. But to make it operational you have to have paramedics attached to it.”

Five of them are funded by the NHS.

For him, the money would be better spent on measures to improve ambulance response times on the road. “We should be focusing on getting a better service for rural parts of the county,” said Mr Power.

A luxury or a life-saver — a tough call? The Challenge Oxfordshire campaign should go a long way towards showing whether Oxfordshire is at last ready to come to the aid of its air ambulance.