So come on 3D what is your total number of support staff and what shifts do they work?
And, out of interest, what does one of your licensed engineers get paid? And how much leave do they get.
While we are on the subject, what leave entitlement do aircrew get in CivSAR and what sickness pay and benefits are there?
Yes 31 does seem generous but bear in mind the relatively low experience levels since many of the RAF engineers didn't transfer across and a lot who joined have little if any Sea King experience. The military manning levels were not that much higher and given that the Falklands had to be manned from that establishment as well as all the career training, courses, OOA detatchments and every other thing that the military requires, makes the figures more reasonable.
As for engineering practices - yes I think we could do without a whole raft of paperwork and crappy computer systems that make each engineering task take twice as long to complete as it should. But I don't have a problem with overservicing since I have to strap my a8se into the aircraft. One issue is that if the manufacturers say a MRGB is lifed for 3000 hours, the CAA agree but the military then reduce that TBO to 2500 (for example) and any exceedance of that 2500 has to be agreed using %age extensions - this increases the frequency of component changes and thus ramps up the engineering task, especially when more hours are flown annually on our aircraft. Why is this done? I think historically because military flying tends to be harder on the aircraft than civil so greater margins are allowed for fatigue.
Interestingly the first tyhing AW have done is to use the extensions on components to try and build some flex into the deep servicing problems.
There is obviously a dissimilarity in the aircraft (Sea King to S61) since we have all the complexities of the folding head system (which we don't need) and a full radar fit whereas the S61 has a simple MRH and a cloud and clonk radar (black box out, black box in) These 2 elements coupled with the outdated simplex Mk31 autopilot on the Mk 3 make up a lot of the engineering snags. Add in the fuel computers (hydromechanical on s61 I believe) and you have an aircraft that takes more engineering effort to keep serviceable.