Limpopo - not before my time at all. They used to winch at 20' in the Whirlwind I believe and we used 30' in the Wessex - now we are 50' in the Sea King - how high would you choose to operate in a 101?
If you can't hover over the casualty, how on earth are you going to effect a winch rescue? It's all very well saying adjust your procedures but there are practical limits, as I'm sure you know, to how far away you can be from the casualty and still maintain an accurate hover, especially at night.
Those I know who have been in the water under a Merlin say it is a great deal worse than a Sea King, to the point where the downwash can submerge a person in the water.
There is only so far you can go to mitigate the effects of the downwash and I believe that the EH101 is unsuitable for around 70% of UK SAR jobs for that reason.
Just to give a recent example - we rescued a kayaker with a dislocated hip in S Wales last week, he was at the bottom of a steep, wooded gorge and we winched from about 120' through trees to get him. The downwash with a few knots of wind on the nose was not sufficient to cause a hazard but a 101downwash would very likely have been breaking branches off , putting the ground party at great risk of being injured themselves. We had to be down near tree-top height for references so climbing wasn't an option.
If someone built a high-speed Wessex with up to date avionics and a radar then you would probably have the perfect UK SAR cab
And if we don't get a mixed fleet in 2012, I will be very surprised indeed.
Leopold - apparently, British Leyland sold a great many cars - it doesn't mean they were any good though