Thanks all for the feedback re. cable retrieve winches.
I was just thinking about ways to reduce the increased amount of retrievals required with the new 2-drum winches versus the old 6-drum winches (which will take more time, and require more personnel).
If 73 Vikings are recovered and split between the 11 VGSs, then each VGS will have 6-7 airframes each. With this in mind, in hindsight it may have been better for 2FTS to order 11 Skylaunch SkyDrive 6-drum winches, as opposed to 25 2-drum winches. It makes little sense to upscale the size of the VGSs, but downscale the winch frequency rate, but we are where we are now - I guess we'll just have to accept more retrievals in future.
Skydrive 4 or 6 Drum Winch