Noble sentiments Nick but in recent conflicts the evidence has proved against this 'we are at war so all the rules go out of the window' and highlighted that sensible, flight safety based prodcedures that work well in peace-time also prevent keen combat pilots doing the enemy's job for him.
20/20 hindsight is a great way to be able to justify your decisions and I take the point that when guys are dying you don't want to be the one who says no to the mission, but those guys will die just the same if you launch and crash. So it is with SAR - we all want to save lives, it's our job and many of us feel passionate about it. But, we are not supermen and the hardest decision to make is the one not to go/to turn back/not to winch out because the risk to the aircraft and crew (who are the captain's first responsibility)ooutweighs the benefits to the casualty.
If any shore-based medic is asked whether or not to casevac a casualty from a ship he will almost always say yes because he must err on the side of caution. He may well give a different decision if he is able to physically examine the casualty but the only way of doing that is to get him out there. There are many occasions when SAR aircraft are scrambled to injured/dying crew many miles out in the Atlantic, only to arrive and find the bloke standing on the deck with his suitcase packed, ready to go home.
Despite this, we will always launch and do our best to recover them but at the point we start to break limits weather/aircraft/crew or whatever we must be fully prepared for others to criticise unless there was no possible alternative course of action - not so in this recent case.
I don't want to die in a heroic mission that fails to succeed - I want a long career of saving lives professionally.