My experience and observations lead me to believe that the lads who turn the wrenches on the helicopters, the lads who pack the chutes, check the pyro, load test the hoisting baskets, etc. are already overworked. But, our outlooks apparently differ. It certainly depends upon your organization, where you are located, how the SAR organization is funded and set up, whether it's civil or military, manning structure, what types of airframes are operated, etc. Many variables involved.
A 16-person basket implies a hook and lifting capacity of some 2000kg once you get the people in it. That's a fairly good-sized helicopter, which is great if you have a few. My guess is that a rescue device will seldom, in and of itself, drive other acquisitions. You also need somewhere to set the basket down on both ends of the lift and it needs to be loaded and unloaded.
{Since more than once I've seen a 50' boat off Haiti with over 300 people aboard and about 20cm of freeboard in the Caribbean and have an acquaintance rescue swimmer who disarmed a freighter crewmember of a rather large knife he was using as a means to persuade his fellows that he belonged at the head of the queue, I am a bit leery about trusting frightened rescuees, even trained ones, with managing their own loading in an orderly fashion and staying within the load limits of the device... to my mind that raises the further question of how are you going to get someone on the deck or in the water to supervise loading this thing?}.
As far as putting this basket on a ship deck in a seaway... depends upon the ship, depends upon the seas and other environmental factors. If an oil rig is in such extremis that everybody needs to get off and hasn't already done so via the lifeboats, I can't think of a lot of scenarios where it will be possible to put this basket down on the rig safely to carry out the initial evacuation when it wouldn't also be possible to land aboard. If there's a fire on the rig... can't use it. If the wind is howling at 70 knots... can't use it. Post-hurricane, lifting people off roofs and porches in sketchy weather with telephone lines and trees and the like about... I surely wouldn't enjoy trying it. Those are precisely the times when large numbers of people can find themselves wishing to be evacuated.
It might work in the UK or similar location in a tightly confined waterway, though I still have my doubts, because it is not particularly likely that it will be consistently used on a lovely day.
But, weather, terrain, and other existing conditions differ widely between different locations, and I may be limiting my thought processes. In the U.S., simply because of the transit distances involved on a significant percentage of SAR cases (we considered anything out to 100nm to be short-range) it would be impractical because you'd either need a whole lot of these things in various spots (all of which need to be maintained, which would be a logistical nightmare) or you'd need something to haul it internally so you could get it on scene with some haste. And even then, you still have to rig it to the outside of the machine once on scene.
Perhaps it is a matter of perspective. My last SAR unit had an operating area of approximately 18 million square miles... that is not a typo. I have friends in Alaska who have done SAR cases with 10-hour transit times from Kodiak to Attu via Cold Bay and Adak in the Aleutians just to get to the jumping off point so the case can be prosecuted. Even in someplace considered to be comparatively small, such as Hawaii, it's an hour and a half to Hilo from Oahu and just under an hour to Barking Sands, Kauai at 140 knots.
Someone also has to pay for all this. I suspect if the sums were done and a history of actual cases where it might have made the difference was developed within a given operating area, a cost-benefit analysis wouldn't support it when everything from infrastructure to airframe mods and maintenance were taken into account in most SAR environments. It may seem blasphemous that the saving of lives at sea would ever be reduced to an accounting exercise, but the reality is that it generally does come down to that in the end.
But, maybe this could be made to work and I'm sure it has its place. I just don't happen to think in the environments I'm familiar with it would be particularly useful, so up 'til now, I haven't been sold on it.
That said, I could be wrong, I often am.
Last edited by Um... lifting...; 21st Feb 2009 at 18:57.