Tourist, your assertion that SAR cabs could do away with radar, and that blind arc is so much more important to the pingers, is just plain rubbish. I've often used (not just 1%) radar on SAR, for searching, let downs (both coastal and open water) and general SA. I understand blind arc limitations as well as any pinger crew - I would imagine they affect us equally. It's not a major problem, and coping with it is relatively straightforward, but when you're in the hover near a busy sea lane and trying to prevent being run over by 40,000t of container ship, blind arc is a pain in the @rse. I'm sure my captain, asking me in our MS10 after the event why I didn't see that ship coming, would take great comfort from my reply that the chances of that happening to a SAR cab were "almost zero".
You have a very strange idea of how SAR crews operate...