No - a large number of engineers are required to maintain a SAR shift when the aircraft has to be maintained iaw RAF procedures and flys twice the amount of a civilian SAR flt.
I don't know how often S61's have gearbox problems but we have had a spate of changes recently, all completed on the flight which wouldn't be possible with 2 engineers per shift.
It's not rocket science to determine that the less an aircraft flys, the less servicing it requires and therefore the fewer engineers are needed.
At the moment our servicing is a disaster area - the move to calendar servicing meant more servicing on the front line and DARA's failure to deliver has put huge delays into the system resulting in massive extensions on most of the fleet. There is a way to service SAR helicopters but it is not what we are doing at the moment.
AW and VT are taking over our servicing top to bottom and strangely they haven't said it can be done with 2 engineers per shift either.