Strato Q: Mr Point - no I would not be happy on one engine 240 nm from the shore, that is why I tend to have 4.
Strato Q: You may be alright Jack with 4 engines, but the Sea King won’t be after a single engine failure in the hover. Unlike the pilots, the rearcrew don't have their single-seat dinghy attached to then via a lanyard and are almost certain to end up in the water in just an immersion suit.
Having a Nimrod available to give you an accurate position on the way out to an incident means that you don't have to waste precious fuel searching for the vessel in distress. This gives you the largest possible margin for error when it comes to on-scene endurance during a long-range incident.
There hasn't been a long-range ditching of a Sea King because of good fortune, not because of planning: the Wessex force wasn’t quite so lucky.
As a crew member on an aircraft with 4 hydraulic systems that can serve the flying controls, and also 4 engines, do you really think that providing topcover once every 6 weeks is really burdening the Nimrod fleet?