AW101
To me, AW101 usefulness in SAR is mainly about HUGE distances and that is why they are in Canada and Portugal. It's in Norway solely because of the governments insistence on the ability to shift large numbers.
TCM Status and Pay
Crab and I have been like a stuck stereo record player on this subject for some time.
I can claim to have introduced myself to Bristow's UKSAR Director back in 2014 with the words, "Do you think you're paying your rearcrew enough?" a question that I repeated to her at the INV launch in 2015, so I have not been shy about raising the issue.
It won't be helpful that a portion of TCM may not see the problem since most prior military leavers and some older Managed Transition will have immediate pension entitlement (AFPS75?) making them significantly more comfortable than ab initio.
The training and accreditation advances of Edn3 of CAP 999 are only a couple of years old so it may be too early to see any long-term effects on 'the market'. However, after recent musical chairs at BHL SAR, the management appear to be MBA-ATPL-heavy in a business sector where, as Crab has often expressed plainly,
all the value gets added at the end of a wire.