Originally Posted by
Biggus
The primary role of SAR is to save lives, civilian or military is irrelevant.
There are currently 12 assets (11 overnight) to provide coverage for 65M people. That's 1 helo for every 5M ish, which is pretty thin coverage at times, especially if ageing aircraft produce poor serviceability or bad weather precludes flying.
That's a bit misleading to me, since of the 65M people, probably 64M of them are nowhere near needing Search and/or Rescue at any one particular time. Perhaps a better comparison would be the number of square miles a particular asset has to cover. Just like RNLI planning, there will be "hot" areas and others less well used.
There are also other assets that help too. The RAF SH force maintain a national standby, and I believe the C130 guys do too. Some jobs don't need a yellow budgie, but do need to get say from Hospital A to Hospital B very quickly, and sometimes a Sikorsky isn't the way to do that most effectively. Or perhaps doesn't have the room for the requisite medical team. Wokkas have a lot more room.