Back in 1979 I was involved in preparing to move 230Sqn from Odiham to Gutersloh. As this meant dividing all Puma spares and role equipment in half we carried out a full fleet wide inventory check of Puma kit; something not done for some time as these checks were normally only carried out on individual aircraft rather than the whole force. Unsurprisingly this revealed huge shortages of role equipment including nearly all the gun mounts and pintles. Due to the scale and cost of these losses the supply management branch insisted that we justified all the items that were needed and I ended up making a visit to the SH staff in MOD to try and get the necessary funding. Interestingly, when it came to the gun mounts and pintles I was advised that guns would never be fitted to the Puma and MOD would not support the purchase of replacements!