The Royal Flying Doctor Service (RFDS), commonly known as the Flying Doctor, is an aeromedical retrieval service in Australia. It is a non-profit organisation that provides urgent and emergency medical transport for patients in rural and remote areas of Australia who require transfer to a higher level of care (such as a tertiary referral hospital). RFDS also provides primary health care services such as general practice, mental health and allied health to remote communities who would otherwise have limited access. The RFDS comprises six autonomous regional organisations (such as the RFDS Queensland Section) and a federation office in Canberra.

John Flynn had worked in rural and remote areas of Victoria and was commissioned by the Presbyterian Church to look at the needs of people living in the outback. His report to the Presbyterian Assembly in 1912 resulted in the establishment of the Australian Inland Mission (AIM), of which he was appointed Superintendent. In 1928, he formed the AIM Aerial Medical Service, a one-year experiment based in Cloncurry, Queensland. This experiment later became The Royal Flying Doctor Service.

Flynn's missionary work involved the establishment of hospitals in bush communities, but this did not help those who lived far from any major community. In his public speaking he would often retell the tragic circumstances that had befallen several bush settlers. The fate of Jimmy Darcy, in 1917, was one of these stories.

It was from stories such as this that Flynn, and his following at the AIM, became inspired to develop a route of communications that could solve the problem of remoteness, but no feasible technology seemed apparent. THE RADFS

Victorian pilot Lieutenant (John) Clifford Peel had heard Flynn's public speeches, and on being shipped out to France for World War I in 1917, sent Flynn a letter explaining how he had seen a missionary doctor visiting isolated patients using a plane. Assisted by costing estimates by Peel, Flynn immediately took the idea of using aircraft to begin his idea, and published Peel's idea in the church's newsletter. Peel died in combat in September 1918, probably not even knowing the impact he had in the creation of an Australian icon.

Along with motorised flight, another new technology was being developed that could replace the complicated means of communication by telegraph. Together with Alfred Traeger, Flynn began experiments with radio in the mid-1920s to enable remote outposts to contact a centralised medical base. The pedal radio was the first result of this collaboration. These were distributed gradually to stations, missions and other human residences around Cloncurry, the base site for a 50-watt transmitter.

Experimental aerial medical services commenced in 1926 and an injured miner was transported by air from Mount Isa to Cloncurry in November 1927.

By 1928, Flynn had gathered sufficient funds through fundraising activities to launch the experiment of the AMS on 15 May. Its supporters included industrialist HV McKay, medical doctor George Simpson and Hudson Fysh, one of the founders of Qantas. Qantas supplied the first aircraft to the fledgling organisation, VH-UER a De Havilland DH.50, dubbed "Victory". On 17 May 1928, two days after inception, the service's first official flight piloted by Arthur Affleck departed from Cloncurry, 85 miles to Julia Creek in Central Queensland, where the plane was met by over 100 people at the airstrip. Qantas charged two shillings per mile for use of the Victory during the first year of the project.