Jungly - where do you think Mr Bristow will take the SAR pilots from that he needs to do UK SAR - oh yes the military, RN and RAF.
The lack of spares is an engineering issue, the IPT is run by engineers and consistently fails to deliver.
The engineering can be done significantly cheaper by civvy contractors - would it be as good? No but that is the argument you propose for sacking RAF SAR.
You don't need more front line Sea Kings, you need a modern, serviceable helicopter with reduced maintenance costs - but Merlin sure ain't it!
Don't confuse deployable SAR with CSAR - the latter is not a job for a yellow helicopter with a winch, it is a job for an SH machine with loads of guns and grunts in the back and some gunship topcover - the Sea King would be shi*e at it which is why the spams use MH53E.
We could train all pilots for 5 years to ensure they were absolutely top hole at everything before being allowed to go to the front line but engineers would be slagging us off for having an easy life and costing too much money.
Take the SAR role from Culdrose and Prestwick and you have a load of helos trying to justify their existence doing bugger all work, I think their MCT and sub roles are the secondary ones now.
However, you are correct that all SAR drivers are gods and easily worth treble what we are actually paid but that's what you get for working hard at school!