He said the hospital was in Flagstaff. Flagstaff is not that big of place - there are two hospitals there so that would narrow the search down. Medivac would transport to a hospital certified as a trauma center if at all possible - Flagstaff Medical Center (one of the two hospitals in Flagstaff) is the only level 1 trauma center north of Phoenix so my bet would be that was where he went (assuming his story has at least the location correct).

What he is describing, based on 20+ years working in EMS, is protocols called Rapid Sequence Intubation (RSI). RSI is used frequently in Medivax and the head trauma scenario you described is one of the the situations where that almost always happens. The reason for it sometimes being done possibly early on in treatment is because intubating a patient while in flight can be very hard or even impossible to do so they do it before loading the patient into the helicopter. There are no EMS x-ray machines so the medics have no way of knowing the severity of internal injuries based only on external observations so they have to plan for worse case scenario when they have prolonged transport times because things can go from looking stable to "oh shit" in a split second. Sometimes those calls (Medivac vs. ground transport, RSI vs not, etc.) are made simply on the basis of the mechanism of injury - meaning, "Damn, that is one bad wreck - no way this guy did not get injured during that".

RSI explained in link:

https://www.hahv.org/Uploads/Public/Documents/HealthAlliance%20PDFs/Provider%20Portal/RSI%20Information%20Margaretville%20only%202.28.17.pdf