At the risk of repeating myself, I have experience of Acquisition (Procurement in old money) but am in no way a SME when it comes to SAR-H or the current provision of UK SAR.
However, some of the posts on this thread, and my own research in the last few days, leads me to believe that some strange things are going on with respect to SAR-H.
Firstly, there have been some very informed posts recently and there was a brief outbreak of sensible debate. Unfortunately, there seemed to be a distinct change in mood when people started to equate training hours with the different roles and responsibilities of the civilian and military SAR units in the UK. That was what prompted my enquiry as to how to compare the civilians and the military in an objective manner, a reasonable question I thought.
At this point, SARCO comes out of the woodwork and decides that we should all shut up because SAR-H will deliver the best and most professional service and that anybody who disagrees is misguided (I am paraphrasing but you get my drift). The thing is SARCO, your comments have 'vested interest' written all over them. If, as you seem to imply, you are a SAR helo tasker, I would have thought that you would have, at the very least, a small amount of concern about such a radical change to UK SAR. I might be doing you a dis-service, for which I apologise, but you are amazingly confident about a PFI programme when PFIs do not have a marvellous track record for delivery. Hence my suspicion about your motives.
As a final point, I found this on the net from a conference held last year:
14:40 Understanding The Case For Civilmilitary Cooperation- SAR-H case study: Examining the viability of military cooperation in the UK’s Search & Rescue Helicopter Project (SAR-H)
- Benefits of PFI for major projects
- Harmonisation of capability through civil-military cooperation
- Future directions in civil-military collaboration
John Astbury CBE
Chief Executive
Maritime and Coastguard Agency, UK
The full details of the conference can be found at:
http://www.iqpc.co.uk/cgi-bin/templates/document.html?topic=228&event=10810&document=78578
Having read this my questions are:
1. What qualifies John Astbury (a civilian with no military experience that I have been able to find) to decide what the military's viability in SAR-H is?
2. Surely, as a civilian, his presentation should have been entitled,
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SAR-H case study: Examining the viability of civilian cooperation in the UK’s Search & Rescue Helicopter Project (SAR-H) ?
3. Given that the MCA have a representative in the SAR-H IPT, should their Chief Executive be allowed to conduct such an obvious 'land grab' on their behalf given that he will have access to commercially in confidence information?
Thank you all for reading this far. I will post more as I uncover it because this is turning out to be far more interesting than first thought!
HAL