I appreciate you idea about old Hueys, and with the places that these machines will need to go, looks are not required. This will not be a White Landcruiser operation, if you get my drift.
One problem of such old equipment is cost of ownership. It is often relatively easy to get capital to start up operations, but getting the running costs can be more difficult, as "donor fatigue" sets in. So it might be better to start off with a machine with low utilisation costs.
Today's Trib on page 7 has an article from the Boston Globe by Craig Cooper who is at Harvard in Public Health. He gets to the same point with, "When a deployment of just 40 navy helicopters requires 6 days, more than 9,000 sailors and $7 billion of military equipment, something, somewhere has gone wrong..."
There must be a better way.