Originally Posted by
EESDL
Is Prestwick back on State yet?
Golf Papa was flown back up from Lee-on-Solent on 19th February and was doing SAR jobs that evening.
It is operating with c/s 199 which indicates that it is not upgraded to the UKSAR2G spec.
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- Two upgraded aircraft now at Inverness, c/s 851.
- One old spec aircraft at Prestwick
- Another two upgraded AW189 required for Oban and Carlisle by the end of this month
- Lydd already changed to 2G-spec AW139 and moving to Manston
- Lee-on-Solent back on AW139
- St Athans back on AW139
- Caernarfon has AW139 on work-up for the service's most notable changeover at the end of this month
- Another two upgraded AW189 required for Sumburgh and Stornoway later in the year
In 1998, the National Audit Office noted that with MoD-DASA and the Coastguard publishing incompatible reports and statistics about SAR helicopters, the UK government had no way of knowing what the scale and nature of the SAR helicopter task was.
In 2001, this was mentioned in a Coastguard commissioned report, but nothing had been done.
In the 2006 update, again, nothing.
Now it was getting scary because they were issuing a contract notice for the 25 year PFI and still couldn't define the task ably. (Was inappropriate bidder recruitment really the only reason that collapsed?
) In the panic of 2011 to get something workable in place, the DfT conceived the 10 base solution and two different aircraft types distributed around the country, and that was operational in 2015. It worked but wasn't perfect. In 2020, the contract process for UKSAR2G included the online modelling tool for bidders that allowed them to use the real data from the first unified contract to create a made-to-measure regime for the new one.
In 2022, BHL were awarded the contract on the basis of the first proper dataset for the UK SAR helicopter task since the matter was raised TWENTY FOUR YEARS earlier.
When Rescue 848 is dragged out of the hangar at Stornoway on 1st January 2027, it will be the final component of a fleet that took over TWENTY EIGHT YEARS to properly define and implement.
Gimme fkn strength.
