PA, in itself it is a perfectly correct statement. But it is considerably less than half the story.
A number of helicopters used to fly as much as they reasonably could.
Extra hours spent transitting around the UK may have an overall lower hourly cost, but the NPAS system means each helicopter will have to fly further to get to a task.
If experience so far is anything to go by, there will also be a lot of flying around to try and get fuel, especially at night.
Finally, a whole tranche of jobs are time critical, and NPAS aircraft will arrive later, arguably too late.
On average, of course.
The sadness is that those in charge either don't know enough to know about these things, or (perhaps even worse) they do know but have chosen to join the dark side.
If you want meaningful data then may I suggest 2 candidates for a comparative analysis:
Cost per task attended (or perhaps deployed for)
The probability of a successful outcome per task requested
Last edited by Helinut; 28th Dec 2012 at 16:47.