AGS Man,
You can't be far away - the Bagger was over my house too!
TM,
Yes, Chinook crews were involved in Air India. However, the crews used to do a lot more winching training back then (and there were not live people on the line in that incident
) - plus it's not been much of a priority recently. In the FI if a long range SAR job came up we'd plan to take a SAR rearcrew specialist with us. Plus, the Chinook door is not optimised for recovering the winchman/pax - the SK door is far better.