Just because you haven't seen it...
Hi Crab, compared to your experience in SAR my 2000hrs is probably not quite a dog-watch, but at about the 1300hr mark when conducting a rather benign winch to the bow of a wreck we used for training I noticed that I, as rescue crewman, was being air taxied away from the bow towards the beach, fortunately just 200m away.
The abrupt change to the planned sortie was due to the fact that a couple of strands had parted (for no apparent reason) and so the crewman aborted the winch and elected to sling me to the beach.
On return to base advice from engineering as to why the wire had failed was a blank; it was within tolerance and all documents were in order?
The reason for this post is to point out that just because something hasn’t been witnessed by an experienced individual does not mean that it will never occur. An example of this is the following infamous quote:
“When anyone asks how I can best describe my nearly forty years at sea, I merely say, uneventful… I never saw a wreck and never have been wrecked, nor was ever in any predicament that threatened to end in disaster of any sort… I cannot conceive of any vital disaster happening to this vessel. Modern ship building has gone beyond that”
Captain E J Smith, shortly before he sailed as master of RMS Titanic