SASless,
Do not worry - your eyes were not deceiving you. Of course I know that no SH crew would ever have pulled the mythical crew duty card (unless they were so fatigued from a previous op/sortie that it would have been more dangerous for them toactually strap in).
Dont be silly - it has taken us years to shake the 'whole cloud of crew duty off' and hopefully everyone knows the difference between fatigue management and crew duty.
Just to ensure that you and the crews reading this are 100% sure that there is absolutely no doubt in the participants bravery - no doubt at all - and I think that was made clear.
My mentioning of crew duty came in the same breath as u/s cabs, other jobs etc etc - because I wasn't there then there may be some extraneous circumstance surrounding the mission that prevented a more robust Combat Recovery plan from being planned and executed. As I freely admitted these other factors in the heat of battle just may make my post superflous and the crews may have been up continuosly for the last 48 hours or the aircraft were called and went u/s on start - who knows?
The fact is that from afar it appears that there are not the resources to conduct this kind of mission (I even dared to say Lynx in this immediate role). And as others have said, there are units fully trained and validated in this role - or was that just a 'box ticking' exercise to give the appearance of having the capability? Surely if there was any Theatre that required it then with the on going high tempo, high risk kinetic ops present over there then one could argue that a commander on the ground should have this capability at his disposal rather than relying on 2 AH to fly back in.
No no no.......I most certainly wasn't passing comment on the crews in the cockpit at the moment in time - very brave, very brave indeed - but rarely do I use the word humble and it was in that post.
Last edited by MaroonMan4; 19th Jan 2007 at 06:16.