DD,
it isn't really about whether or not your 7000 hrs on the 737 family is suffficient for you to become an overnight expert or not. The real issue is that due to a poor choice of airframe, the USN is now having to re-write most of its ASW manual because the much vaunted P8 is struggling to achieve most of its KURs. The heavily pushed (by Boeing) advantages, such as the large commonality with other members of the 737 family, are beginning to be found somewhat lacking. The original figures talked about 75%+ commonality. Now that they have realised that commercial aircraft aren't built to withstand hours on end at low level, in a salt-laden environment, with additional bits and pieces hanging off every conceivable spare area of real estate, that commonality figure has dropped to 35% and is still decreasing as the P8 gets further and further away from the COTS solution it was originally intended to be. And that's the rub with COTS, it's cheap so long as it does what you want it to and so long as that is what everyone else wants it to do then they get built in huge numbers and are cheap. The moment you take something like the 737, designed to do one thing and try to change it, the costs spiral. The other thing that people seem to forget is that the P8 is only a part of the USN's intended maritime inventory, BAMS is the other bit you need to buy in order to do the areas of the job the P8 can't. So I now have to buy 2 separate systems, or accept that my future ASW is going to have to be done from medium level, if I go down the P8 only route. Finally, just on pure numbers, looking at the published figures for P8 Max Take-off Mass, Max Zero Fuel Mass and likely fuel burn rates, the P8 is going to manage about half the endurance of MRA 4 and none of it will be at low level. The submariners must be wetting themselves!!