Spanish - we have been told that the ratio will be 33%/33%/33% civ/RAF/RN on the flights, I guess the RN have bigger friends in important places than us!
Hummingfrog - thanks for the info, I naively hoped that such a vital govt contract would require a different approach in order to assure safety of the crews and those to be rescued.
You can't just grow SAR experience on trees, as you well know, and surely the safest option is to employ those already current in UKSAR now (those that want to go of course). There are clearly an awful lot of people out there who want to be SAR pilots and rearcrew but in the short term you need to transfer the existing experience because all the training (apart from that on type) has already been done and any other crewmembers will be playing catch-up on the job which is not ideal.