The big issue is that UKSAR is a NATIONAL resource.
So, when the Southern flights are all doing (eg) Gloucester floods, there is an Officer at Kinloss who has both the responsibility and the authority to redeploy assets so as to maintain the best coverage in the event of another emergency.
UK EMS helos are all charity funded, and are all tied to localities. With the greatest respect to the work they do, they are organisationally like the Royal Flying Corps in 1916. The advantages of air power - speed, flexibility, mobility, are being sacrificed on command and control boundaries.
The RAF SAR Force responds, as best as it can given the shoddy state of its machines, to any emergency anywhere in the UK regardless of conditions (other than temperature beow -7 in visibility below 1k)
EMS turn up within county boundaries. UKSAR will do its best wherever the incident happens to lie.
Is that not what we should expect from Government services?- regardless of the name on the side of the machine?
Sven
Last edited by Sven Sixtoo; 24th February 2009 at 21:19.