StopStart,
That made me chuckle on a miserable Tuesday morning, but Stuffy does have a point. Far far too much of the UK's national and enabling infrastructure has been sold off (given away!) to foreign corporations or is now controlled outside of the UK and it puts us at a serious strategic risk.
One of the few things I remember from an extremely tedious 6 months at IOT were the lectures (can't even remember the name of that bit of the syllabus, so can't have been that memorable). In one of them, they pointed out that whilst SAR spent most of its time rescuing overweight walkers in flip flops from Ben Nevis or teenagers with a Darwin complex stuck on a pedalo in the North Sea, their raison d'etre was the rescue of aircrew during times of war.
Now I'm not saying an invasion and fight for national survival is imminent, but I do wonder whether that key fact was remembered during the contract discussions. I'd hate for there to be a shooting match and we find out that SAR is no longer able to pick up crews because the threat is deemed to be too great and the Board and shareholders simply wouldn't stand for losing an ac. Or they do go out, but only after we pay the equivalent of a year's contract in advance for one mission. I'm sure it's all been considered, just saying ...