Indeed. And consider how long each winch cycle would take. 2 pax at a time. 20 (?) pax a load. I don't think that helicopters are the answer to a major disaster at sea unless you can land a Chinook on deck. The primary means of rescue has to be by sea, with helicopters to pick up the badly injured.

running in. Sorry for the delay, been otherwise engaged.
These figures are direct from the Westland website.
Cabin length is 8.86ft.
width is 6.89ft.
height is 4.6ft.
A bit of a squeeze are not the words I would use but close to them.
According to the latest "rumour" from MCA/CHC the 139 will only have five pax.seats anyway!!! So much for the recently announced, see previous posts, formation of offshore firefighting teams. They travel in teams of six minimum, plus their kit, to be delivered to the ship all in one lift.
The previously mentioned seats will be easy fit/remove to enable the carriage of stretcher/s. (troopseats?).Presumably they will have legs that fit through holes in the sea tray. That doesn't sound like much of a corrosion problem does it! Still, it will keep the engineers busy and out of the crewroom.
Droopystop.
Agreed. But these incidents rarely happen on days like today and imo the more assets, correctly used and timed, the better.

A question I have asked but have not yet had fully answered relates to seats and fully compliant airframes like the AW139.

As civvie machines it seems that anyone carried should have [must have?] a fully compliant seat to place themselves on.

At the moment older airframes [pre-JAR] can get away with sitting bums on floors so such as the BK117 can get away with having insufficient headroom for cops in proper stroking seats.

So is it should have or must have?

Picking up survivors from the sea is truly an emergency where you can have bums on the floor for the excess numbers but is transporting firemen to an emergency not likely to be requiring the compliant crashworthy seats for each and every one of them?

I cannot find the finite answer. Any thoughts?