Soundman
I'm not an ex Nimrod, but ex 771 819 Seaking SAR.
The reason is that it is really really difficult to spot things from the air at any distance.
We used to carry out Royal Navy Sea Drills in Falmouth Harbour for training aircrew in sea survival once a week. The "casualties" would be in single seat life rafts. These are coffin sized and dayglo orange sitting up about 60cm above sea level.
Even in smooth inshore waters it is astonishing how close you have to be to see them. We would fly out from RNAS Culdrose looking for them but often had to just fly towards the tender that looked after them just to get close enough to ID. This was on smooth inshore water.
Yes, if you flew higher in the P3 your horizon would be greater, but the cleared swath of sea checked would be no wider, and slightly less well checked.
To give an idea, in a Seaking I would expect to be flying a 60kts or less and 200ft or less if looking for small objects
Last edited by Tourist; 26th Mar 2014 at 19:17.