Something Witty/LFFC,
I agree with your analysis(and I am crab SH by the way). Slagging off night currency and the Chinny force just brings too much emotion into the arguement and we all know what a fantastic job each force does/has done on Ops. What we have now is the right mix of helos for the job. Maroon Man was simply goading you - and you both fell for it.
However, the elephant in the room remains, ............who takes the redundancies that are coming our way, the RN or the RAF; and who bears the enormous cost of re-training not one, but 2 helicopter forces, whilst trying to maintain Ops in AFG? I can tell you now, there is simply not the infrastructure/money to do this. Speak to most of the Mk3 community, and they will tell you that they don't want to go to the banana. What do you do with the sim post conversion. CAe and SerCo must be rubbing their hands with the number of zeros they are about to add to the bill if they have to move to Somerset. 35 RAF Mk3/3a crews into 25 ac does not leave enough hours for everyone at the moment, so how will 42 Jungly crews solve the problem. Marinisation will add a significant amount of weight to an already underpowered helicopter. There is no roping platform for MCT, the list goes on.
Bad blood between the Junglies and the RAF SH community does no-one any good. This is not an attempt to hi-jack SH by CAS, it is simply the stark reality of what we are both faced with.