Not a very well written piece since it keeps mixing up the number of crews and the number of bases.
To clarify - the RAF have 6 SAR flights, the RN 2 and the MCA 4. This announcement only affects the RAF flights.
The RAF SARF cannot maintain 24/7 cover and man the Falklands with 24 crews which we all knew but some Air Ranks didn't believe and so, after trying to take us down to 24 from the 28 we had, we are being taken back up to 28 so the resources match the task (tricky concept that).
Because we were actually undermanned on rearcrew in the first place, reducing crews further has seen the need to bus winchmen and radops around the country to plug gaps in the shift plots of flights who lave lost crews to the Falklands.
The resulting fatigue levels have been assessed as a Flight safety hazard by the SARf Cdr so until the manning is back up to full strength, whichever flight loses a crew to the Falklands will go down to 12 hour shifts with the intention that no two adjacent flights eg Boulmer and Leconfield, are on 12 hours at the same time. A new crew goes every 3 weeks to the Falklands and the detachment is 6 weeks.
At the moment Lossiemouth and Wattisham are on 12 hour days because their crews are in the FI.
This 12 hour manning is temporary and nothing to do with the SARH planned reduction in SAR service post 2012 which will see Portland, Chivenor and Boulmer reduced to 12 hour cover PERMANENTLY in order to save the contractors money.
The concept of SARH was to provide no less capable a service which sits at odds with cutting 3 flights down to 12 hours I am sure someone somewhere is 'managing the risk' - well right up to the point where lives are lost because the cover wasn't there when it was needed.
One other point of fact - at Chivenor, a third of our rescues are at night and I suspect the same is true for most SAR flights. Who will pick up the slack or is it postcode lottery time for SAR now?
The standard answer is that faster helicopters allow medium risk areas to be reached within the hour which, on the face of it, seems obvious but that is only true if you count flying time. If you accept that RS45 means exactly that then your superfast new helicopter has only 15 mins flying time to make the medium risk area from the time of the CALLOUT, not the time of the takeoff.
This is where the 1 hour fudge is applied - the intent of the 1 hour to medium risk areas is time from callout but some have used time of takeoff instead to justify fewer bases and less cost. Unfortunately, if they want to go down that road you could cut the number of bases even further since with a 150 kt helo you only need 150nm between flights.
Fewer helicopters means less flexibility and almost no surge/concurrent ops capability - this is where the great PFI that is SARH is leading us and it stinks.