Crab. could you expand on this? "and AFAIK the impending rear crew shortage still needs to be addressed."
I'm interested in going SAR as Technical Crew, I've seen recent adverts for winch paramedics so do you reckon we'll be seeing winch op adverts soon?
Bristow inherited a sizeable number of very professional, very well trained rearcrew (winchmen and winch Ops) from the RAF and RN when they took the contract - but a number of those guys were on the mature side and injury, retirement, illness etc gives a natural wastage.
A number of winchmen moved up to winch op positions which is why Bristow were recruiting paramedics to train as winchmen - I believe this has worked generally due to very careful selection and good training.
But, Bristow were supposed to create a training school - expensive stuff so it didn't happen - and now they are running out of ex-mil experience to call on.
The aspiration, as I understand it, is to create that training school at Lee on Solent which would be excellent but expensive.
If they don't spend the money, they will run out of technical rearcrew in the new UK contract - not to mention having other, new contracts to service.
They have such a wealth of rearcrew training expertise inherited from the mil that it seems a no-brainer to train ab-initio winchmen and winch ops, not only for UK SAR but the other contracts around the world.