So why are they taking over UKSAR when so much of it is overland???
No definitive answer to that has escaped into the wild.
My understanding is that with the Coastguard, on behalf of the DfT, having been the sole existing purchaser of civilian SAR helicopter services for HM Gov, they were in a prime position to take the reigns. However, in the background, nobody else wanted it.
Not the Home Office, not Health, not Evironment, not Business, and certainly not our dear friends at the MoD.
The story goes (please correct me if you have better info) that when JHC was formed a decision was made by AVM Niven not to include SAR Force and effectively its fate was sealed. Soon after, war fighting in far off hot places, and hot and high places, became the important issue. SAR Force was the unwanted homeless stray. (Many here know a lot more about SK support and availability west of Suez during that period than I do.
)
As the DfT eventually, laboriously, got a half-baked unified contract together for the four bases, and repeatedly stumbled over itself in efforts to quantify
and contract a completely civilian service, other forces were coming into play. The same war fighting that was helping to orphan SAR Force at the MoD was also promoting ITAR enforcement in the USA. This would have been a bit of a challenge to the existing DfT/MCA skill set and may be responsible for the lack of progress with CivSAR equipment specifications. Meanwhile, aircraft carriers were being planned. In the absence of orders for escort destroyers
, it was obvious that the MoD was going to be paying for, em, eh, ... a Search And Rescue Helicopter capability.
A Royal Navy Merlin helicopter checks out HMS Queen Elizabeth | Flickr - Photo Sharing!
Somehow, the monstrous freak that was SARH25, was appropriately euthanased (HM Treasury already begging for an opportunity and it spectacularly arrived). Galvanized into action, the DfT came up with two half-decent contract processes in quick succession (a British public sector first?).
A year from now, the Main UK SAR Helicopter Service contract will be a week away and the first operational crews will have been training in-area for nearly four months. Their training in-area will have commenced during the same month as the ISAF withdrawal deadline which draws to a close a period of repatriation of UK military helicopters and crews, many of whom might prefer the occasional real job as an alternative to sim, x-box, air test and rugby.
At Strasbourg, the European Parliament continues to take the position that the existence of a Single Market makes the continued existence of Member State coastguard services unnecessary. The morphing of the HM Coastguard into UK Rescue, along with development of the appropriate range of additional skill sets, would make a certain amount of sense and provide the organisation with some kind of future regardless of the march of the EMSA empire. Whether that is a bearable outcome at the Southampton care home for ageing salts is anybody's guess.
(Was that OK Crab?)