True Tuckunder may have been on his first tour as a helo pilot and he didn't get his SAR Command straight away (about a year I think), but he did have a lot of airmanship to fall back on, even if it had been flying horrible pointy things with their backsides on fire.
I was also a first tour Sea King pilot (and first tour anything). It was 15 months before I had my SAR command with a total logbook time of 850 hours. The point I am making is that you do not need all those tours or hours under your belt, but you do need a good grounding in your specialist task prior to being a commander. How many of the BOH guys will get decent experience in the job before being a SAR commander? I expect there may be some as I believe that there is at least one ex-RAF SAR commander being employed. How many civil guys have decent Sea King or S61 SAR experience? It will be hard for anyone having only done Day VFR SAR in their past life.
As for training a winchman in 20 hours to do the job? Well, it's been done. The guys have the skills to get someone out of the water, but only at a basic level. What they don't have, which is what military and civil MCA crewmen have, is an awareness of what is going on around them in the aircraft, the ability to know when to talk and when not to, when to help out, etc. That all comes from time in the air and experience. Military crewmen get that before they go anywhere near SAR training.
It will be difficult for them to pick up that experience quickly especially with the limited amount of flying they will do offshore.
Oh and HF, the RAF did give us more than 20 hours to use to train each month, it's just you always sat in your office, so the rest of us used them for you
