“We attended the fires last year in Derbyshire, we arrived within 6 hours of being called out, took the military over 2 days to turn up.” I’m sure that has nothing to do with military response times, in fact I know it hasn’t, more to do with political decision making.
“RAF pilots not really trained to do repeat lifting” Really, not sure what special training there is for lifting one load followed by another, isn’t that what they’re doing right now. I’ve spent 8 hours a day doing exactly that in a Chinook.
PS. Could you do it safely in 1.5 k vis, 500’ and in 1 mulch, which I suspect was the challenge given the late start time and forecast weather?