Zorab, At the end of the day I guess you are probably correct and the service will shake down and make the best of a pretty bad job. Thats what it's always done, and I suspect what it will do now!
Not sure that I agree that the guys on the ground will not know the crews though, because from my experience both in the air and on the ground, the lads on the ground very quickly got to know the voices of the keenest air observers.
I can accept too, that some civilian air observers, especially the ex military ones are capable of doing a darn good job. But I have a natural resistance to trying to remove everything of a specialist nature from the Police. I go back to my point of; Where would we be now if 25 years ago some of us had not kept on pushing - hard for what we got? I repeat, the cash savings are not that great. It is a Police Aircraft, I fully accept that the pilot must, for a variety of reasons be a civilian. Probably the acceptable option might be to insist that just one of the observers provides the police presence.
FFF is also correct. Had NPAS dealt with this whole thing in a more sympathetic way right from the start, they would have taken the service with them and found the whole thing much easier. They preffered the mushroom factory style of management and it has not worked.
tigerfish