The crabs have SAR Staneval and the RN have RNFS(RW) - not non-mil outside agencies but then the MoD haven't been charged with making a profit out of SAR so there is little conflict of interests. Try being beasted by Flying Standards and there is no box-ticking allowed.
When it comes to a decision between saving money (or maintaining profit) and giving extra training hours to meet a required standard - if there's no external audit to ensure the standard is being met, what incentive is there for a contractor not to tick boxes knowing that no-one is there to catch them out.
Will a CAA examiner take every crew member out on a SAR role check sortie every year? No it'll be left to internal checkers who will ensure that the company meets its KPIs no matter how low the operating standard actually is.
Rumour is that the co-jo slots will be filled by minimum spec, potentially overseas newbies with no SAR experience who will fly for peanuts. If that is true then someone really does need a reality check about how dangerous that will be. That would be like taking all the current co-jos in the mil SAR outfits and replacing them with student pilots who possibly just had their SAR famil. The highest workload in a SAR mission is often the co-jos - nav, radar, comms, monitoring the pilot etc and someone wants to put guys with NO experience in there - what could go wrong there?
Also - who get to fly the gnarly left side on deck or cliff winch when the wind doesn't allow right side on? The low time co=pilot with no SAR skills????/
Last edited by Lala Steady; 9th Apr 2013 at 17:14.