SARH to go

[louisnewmark]

As one of my elders and betters once said to me, the wheels must be getting smaller because they’re going round more quickly. If I’m lucky this might prevent another long-winded and poorly-informed circular argument, but as this thread has reached p61 I doubt it!

The SAR-H response requirement was predicated largely on the only authoritative data source available at the time, which was the 2001 coverage report (sorry, can’t remember its full title) which was produced by a working group which included experienced RAF SAR personnel amongst others. This report was the first time that any national operational analysis had been carried out regarding UK SAR helicopter ops and took data from the years 1998, 1999 and 2000. One of the aspects that this report examined was the identification of risk areas in an attempt to focus the response more efficiently than the traditional drawing of day and night range circles around each base; another was to examine the response times that the 2001 SAR service provided to each of these risk areas.

It’s also important to remember that this report, and its subsequent use for SAR-H, pre-dated the requirement for the MCA’s Interim SAR contract, far less its instigation, so the increased speeds of the S-92 and AW139 over the S-61N were not envisaged. The basing distribution, however, has remained unchanged since 2001.

In an attempt to reduce the impact of regionality (the old argument of whether the jobs are there because the SAR bases are, or whether the bases are situated in the right places for the jobs), the working group covered many disciplines including coastguard and mountain rescue and examined all the SAR ops that it considered could have used a helicopter. While this remains a flawed approach remember that it was the first time that any national SAR op analysis had been carried out, and it was therefore the best dataset available to the SAR-H project team at the time – a subjective ‘best guess’ simply wasn’t acceptable for a contract of this nature. The report divided the UK into boxes similar in concept to Georef system, then assigned a risk rating of Very High, High, Medium and Low to each box based on the analysis. It found that, in 2001, the UK SAR service was able to reach 100% of the Very High and High risk areas, and 75% of the Medium risk areas, within 1 hour of take-off (ie transit time). This 2001 capability directly informed the SAR-H requirement which matches the 100% / 75% data. I seem to remember that the SAR-H Project Team has continued to receive annual SAR stats from DASA for a similar purpose and, if the risk areas change significantly over the life of the contract (unlikely but possible) then the basic requirement will, at least in concept, drive appropriate amendments to the service. It’s just a shame that many of the major incidents since then (floods, train crashes etc) happen to have occurred in the ‘lower risk’ areas... Incidentally, the traditional still wind ‘range circles’ that used to be part of standard SAR PR presentations were always predicated on time from take-off, so this is nothing new.

I’m not aware of any goalposts having been moved in this respect since the publication of the report and its adoption as a requirement driver for SAR-H; that would need political approval from a very brave politician (seen many of those recently?), though it’s likely that the maximum possible ‘wriggle room’ may have been exploited within them! It’s also worth remembering that the SAR-H Project Team wouldn’t have “offered up cost savings” unless it was specifically directed to do so by the MOD and MCA as project owners; PTs don’t set policy, they just have to make their projects match it.

Be gentle, it's my first time.

Louis