Originally Posted by
thelearner
HC, thanks for clearing that up for me. Makes perfect sense now.
I may be wrong, but in military, and possibly civilian SAR, are you much more likely to be flying with the same crew all the time compared to commercial NS ops? In FW going by TV documentary's which I watch too much of, often the crew have little experience of each other?
It depends on the particular operation, but in general, because a SAR base typically only has one or two helicoptesr (plus a spares of course) the pilot compliment is much smaller than say a major fleet in Aberdeen. Plus with SAR you tend to spend many hours in the crew room engaging in "banter", and thus know your fellows pretty well.
That said, some of the oil and gas bases are not that big, and due to the rosters (in Bristow anyway, where rosters tend to be very predictable) you often are rostered to fly with a relatively small cadre of pilots. That does of course mean that once in a while you fly with someone new, because they have worked a day off for someone else etc.
But a big part of the job is getting on with your fellow pilot for 8 hours or so, when he might be someone who otherwise you would really not wish to spend any time at all. That's why we have to do courses on the subject -aka CRM!