To mark the end of the Air Ambulance Charity's ‘Up Against Time’ appeal, RAF Northolt welcomed two particularly A-list guests: Prince William, the charity's patron, and David Beckham, an ambassador for the LAAC. The pair were all smiles when they greeted each other at the event, to which they were invited to view two new helicopters, as well to meet the pilots and medical crew. The helicopters were funded by the £16 million raised by the appeal – a quarter of which was the work of Omaze, a for-profit fundraising company.
The Prince asked Beckham to be part of the Omaze campaign earlier this year, a request which the footballer wholeheartedly accepted. ‘As soon as I was asked to be involved by Prince William it was something I was very honoured [to do] in all honesty,’ , citing the decades of ‘incredible work that the pilots and the medics do’ and ‘the millions of lives they've saved’, adding that it was something he was ‘very proud to be invited to be part of’. At the station, Beckham and the Prince joked around together, taking selfies with LAAC representatives and testing out the cockpits of the new helicopters, which they also signed as a marker of their contribution.
The pair looked to be getting on well – which should come as no surprise as the two are, in fact, old friends. Beckham is a self-confessed royalist, and queued with the masses to pay his respects to the late Queen as she lay in state in Hall in 2022. ‘We have been lucky as a nation .