Tallsar - despite the plethora of other rescue agencies, including 2 Devon air ambulances and several police helos, Chivenor has passed 310 callouts already this year and, whilst some of our '20-minute' jobs you feel could be done by others are hardly award-winning, most of the callouts save lives or minimise suffering for a great many people.
I did a 20 minute job the other day at Woody Bay where a man and his dog were cut off by the tide in failing light at the bottom of a 300' cliff in 30 kts of wind and sea state 4. Now a cliff team could have been called but would have taken at leat 30 mins to get there, lete alone set up in the dark and get 300' down only to have to try and get cas plus dog 300' up again - how long would that have taken and what suffering to a less than spring chicken of a casualty? Or an IRB could have launched (we did ask for one just in case we had a problem winching) which would have taken over 30 mins to get there and then been faced with a nasty dumping shorebreak onto boulders to try and get ashore - again putting the casualty in more peril in the water as they would have had to try to extract him somehow.
My point is that your grand view that there are so many other assets that could do the job is fundamentally flawed - all those assets get used regularly for the jobs they are best suited to and they do an excellent job - but there are so many ocassions that a SAR helo is the best weapon of choice for the casualty, and that seems to have been forgotten in your intellectualising of UK SAR.
BTW - Brawdy shut but we still do 50% of our jobs in S Wales so I am afraid your logic is only partly sound - you cannot ignore the fact that our part of the country has an enormous stretch of coastline and attracts millions of visitors every year who deserve protection.
The Air Ambulances do not and are unlikely to ever have (because they are charity funded) a big enough aircraft to perform medtransfers of critically ill patients and how many years will it be before they are allowed to fly at night.
Your 12 Helo solution isn't what is planned under SARH now - at night it will be 9 aircraft for the whole of the UK - do you still think that is enough?
I do know that Stornoway were able to produce a second aircraft and crew ready to go to Cumbria if required - if that sort of response could be guaranteed under SARH, I for one would feel happier about it but it's not in the contract. Well done Stornoway anyway
If all we did in UKSAR was urgent lifesaving then your logic could probably give a 6 base solution but would conveniently ignore the fact that many communities, especially those island ones, Scillies, Orkneys, Shetlands etc rely on the capabilities of a SAR helo all year round.