Crab, do you know how we make normal RN crews into RN SAR crews?
ISPEC goes something like this:
Training Officer 771 - "Lt Bloggs, we are going to make you a SAR pilot!"
Lt Bloggs - "Isn't that just hovering?"
Training Officer 771 - "Certainly not, you will have to learn to hover next to boats!"
Lt Bloggs - "I'm a Navy pilot, I can already do that, just before I land on them usually"
Training Officer 771 - "Well yes, but sometimes it's at night!"
Lt Bloggs - "Yes, we do night deck landings too, plus of course vertrep and HIFR as part of the OCU and then practise it all the time endlessly throughout our entire career."
Training Officer 771 - "Well yes, but sometimes it's in a storm!"
Lt Bloggs - "Yup, and we have to land on them in storms too."
Training Officer 771 - " Ah, but what about cliffs?"
Lt Bloggs - "Just like boats really, but they move less..."
Training Officer 771 - "Mountains?"
Lt Bloggs - "Yup, done Norway and South of France"
Training Officer 771 - "NVG?"
Lt Bloggs - "Christ, even the baggers do that nowadays!"
Training Officer 771 - "Tricky point of no return calculations with no divs?"
Lt Bloggs - "You mean like every flight off a warship except without the added embuggerance of outhouse and emcon silence...."
Training Officer 771 - "Ah, but there is a lot of Captaincy to think about. Some of the decisions are very tricky."
Lt Bloggs - "Yes, that will be a steep learning curve, but I hope my time airborne around the world from small decks in the southern oceans to Antarctica / Iraq / Afghanistan / Somalia / Sierra Leone / Kosovo / Bosnia (delete as required) will help me find a way to cope with the pressure of tricky decisions."
Training Officer 771 - ".....
........it is just hovering isn't it."
Lt Bloggs - "yup, pretty much. I know the Crabs think it a black art, but in the end we all know civvys can do it so it's hardly rocket science."
Training Officer 771 - "when you say "civvys", are you including Crabs?"
Lt Bloggs - "naturally"