Same Again
 

Amen - They take what you say and twist it round without doing one the courtesy of actually comprehending the message.

Where did I say that?

What I actually said was -

.... do our best for one and all and that includes those in your list of unfortunates. Nowhere did I say that we don't offer them a service but you implied that any attempt to help them would fail due to the shortcomings you believe you have identified. I have more confident view because my glass is half full and yours is profoundly half empty.

Happy 2015

G. :ok:

And nowhere did I say this I still want it to be the best SAR service possible but some of us are concerned that trying to provide that within all the constraints imposed by EASA, CAA and most of all training provision make that a difficult task.

Happy 2015:ok:

Same again - welcome as a new member to the ad hom club;)

Just not very comprehensive training. :hmm:

The lead vocal always gets the last word.

"even the new shiny helicopters don't give the pilot a view of what is happening underneath the aircraft"

Some of the SAR cabs have a number of cameras on them one of them pointing down which is a nice gimmick.

How many times in the last ten years have the RAF had to rescue ejectees from the ocean?

hmmmm, you might be confusing footage you have seen from the FLIR/TV turrets with the camera mounted on the tail on some of the new shiny ones.

As for ejectees - don't know the exact stats but there have been a few, mercifully far fewer nowadays than used to be the case but a person in the water is a person in the water and there have been lots of those rescued both by day and night - so what was your point?

By civvy SAR just as much as Military.

No the cameras I have seen are totally independent showing a good picture directly below the a/c.

As for the ejectees question I was curious. Your compatriots bang on about ejectee training and how will the new SAR service provide for this but you have put it quite nicely thankyou, "a person in the water is a person in the water". Case closed.

I see this is turning into the usual civvy v military bitch-off. UK SAR is being civilianised whether we like it or not, will it be any better or worse? Impossible to answer as it will be un-quantifiable; there is no current mechanism to judge overall success in SAR nor will there be in the near future. Will there be less training hours? Yes. Do the military currently over-train? Arguably, yes (I know Crab won't agree but we are, at times, guilty of 'tick chasing '). Will the new cabs be faster/more reliable? Yes. Will there be less bases? Yes. Will the new crews be any less capable? Probably not. All of which means, in all probability, the service will on aggregate be as effective. Some areas will be slightly better, some slightly worse. For those of you unable to accept the inevitable, have a bit of dignity and try supporting those who will do their best to make things work despite limitations that have been imposed outwith their control. Oh, and a safe and successful 2015 to you all.

That's very gracious of you llamaman but I'm not convinced by your reckoning that crews probably won't be any less capable. Irrespective of the capabilities of the individual, they're hamstrung by regulation and limited training resources. On top of this though, the SAR pedigree of some of those being recruited is shaky to say the least - more than anyone, those being recruited without a proper SAR background will need more thorough initial and continuation training than that currently provided/required by Bristow. (Whatever happened to the six month rearcrew OCU? That soon died a death didn't it?) To help prove the point, on this page alone there appear to be at least two of the current Bristow SAR aircrew who seem to think that hazards associated with ejectees are nothing to write home about. Heaven help us. Whatever happened to learning the lessons of the past?

VSF, I don't think you should tar all of the Bristow's crews with the same brush based on the opinion of a couple of characters on this forum. I'm very sad to see the military SAR force go but going it is. I believe my point that the crews will be capable is valid and that they will do their utmost to overcome any limitations imposed upon them. Just as military SAR does. Constant negativity will achieve nothing, a bit of support would not go amiss.

crab, all 139's and 189's can have up to 8 external cameras fitted. Standard fit with the external load kit is to have 2 cameras in the belly, one pointing at the hook in case of a hang up with an external load, and one pointing straight down where the external load would be. They are mounted under the belly in a pod on the right hand side of the belly near sliding door. Great picture with very high resolution. Very useful. Image can be brought up on either of the MFD's up front, or at a crew station, or the 5th screen (if fitted) or all of them.

Sorry Crab, but why are you so insistent that the best service for the winchman and survivor in calm winds and high hover is provided by a winch op using 'hover trim', rather than by the pilot using what is available to him/her? Besides which, the pilot can't see what is going on directly below the aircraft anyway, either day or night, so surely that's irrelevant? (Except, of course, for those downward-pointing dedicated cameras...)

Experience
 

Years and years and years of experience.

It doesn't matter how many cameras that you fit to the helicopter, they are only of use to monitor a situation. You do not have the field of view to give you peripheral vision to be able to hover on them, otherwise you may as well buy drones to carry out all your SAR tasks.

There are some really useful comments posted by experienced guys on this thread, just a shame that the bitching comes up time and again and the voice of experience gets drowned out.

SAR is being privatised, the individual guys will do their best within the limitations that have been shouted about. There will be jobs that cannot be carried out, that has always been the case. When deployed with the RN, my diver was able to explore the cabin of a sunken yacht for casualties, the RAF could never do that, nor will the new service. My current organization has started carrying out night wets training, wow what a shock that is to the guys, but they are expanding their envelope. I suspect that the Mil guys have always tried to do that and are questioning whether the limitations placed on the Civ guys will allow them to do that.

Society is changing, when I started flying, if it wasn't written that you couldn't do something you tried it (within reason). Today, if it is not written that you are allowed to do it, then it is avoided at all costs. There is, in many cases little incentive to do more than the bare minimum, that is what you will get with contractorisation. Live with it.

I have had my rant, I will look in again in 6 months and see if the pointless bitching and back biting continues.:ugh::ugh::ugh:

Cabe

Jeepys, not quite case closed - the additional risks from dealing with an ejectee are from entanglement with their kit or, the really dangerous one, the parachute if it is still attached.

The same risks might be encountered with a kite-surfer, parascender or even base jumper - the need to avoid re-inflating the canopy (or just blowing the kite) is paramount for the safety of the aircraft, crew and casualty.

More often than not, the safest method is a very high hover - to ensure the downwash is clear of the canopy - then a hover trim recovery of the winchman and casualty.

Absolute bread and butter stuff for milSAR rearcrew as they train for it regularly. Why? because the potential for f**kup is enormous.

LouisNewmark - the hover trim is often used for small vessels where maintaining visual from the cockpit is not possible - the difference in reaction time between verbal patter, pilot action and subsequent movement compared to winchop adjustment using hover trim means that hover trim will inevitably be the best option to provide the best service to the winchman. I was on one job where we used hover trim on a 3-masted schooner with 180' masts because there were no hover references in the overhead - trying to use attitude and patter would have been horrendous (I know because we tried it as a dummy, oh yes and it was dark)

Geoffers - I would like to be 'glass half full' but when the rearcrew, who do all the really nasty and messy stuff on SAR, are shafted on pay because they don't have a union or a licence, I have grave concerns about their motivation to go that extra mile beyond the minimum spec in the contract - no matter how professional they are. If you have a set of hard-won skills which rely on personal bravery to achieve and maintain, those skills should be accurately valued and I don't believe the UKSAR payscales do this at all.

Let us hope that 2015 brings some changes in this area.

Nice one. Crab.

"Years and years and years of experience."

Yes, for which I have a great deal of respect....but most of those years were spent on Sea Kings.

Thanks for the concise explanation, Crab; I understand your point, and recognise that there may be a time when 'hover trim' is useful, but I thought that the discussion was centering on wet winching, specifically ejectees, particularly at night. I respectfully suggest that, in such scenarios and with doppler-driven autohover systems being something of an anachronism, the 'hover trim' is virtually redundant and the best service would be provided by the pilot manipulating the AHRS-supported AFCS modes at whatever height might be necessitated by the scenario.

LouisNewmark - I believe both the S92 and the AW189 have very clever autopilots with GPS/inertial nav autohover capability - either the pilot or the winch op can fly the aircraft in this configuration - just the same as the Sea King (the 3A has a more flexible HT arrangement than the mk3 AHT).

So, despite the increase in accuracy - ie laser ring gyro type technology instead of doppler - it is still better (and easier) for the winch op (who can see exactly what is going on under the aircraft and what the winchman is doing) to control the aircraft using a hand controller with both the winch controls and the hover trim controls, than it is for him to verbalise the required movement and for the pilot to react to it.

There will be times when the winch op has to hand back control to the pilot (assisting cabin entry for winchman and survivor for instance) but that can be done quickly as a verbal handover.

There are plenty of rescues where the pilot gets to earn his pop-star wages but at night or when there are limited hover references over water, the hover trim operated by the winch op will be the weapon of choice.

S92 and AW189 SAR will be the same as Sea King SAR but hopefully a bit faster - no matter how shiny and new the aircraft, what happens underneath it hasn't changed much for many years, and for good reason - it works.

Louis
 

He'll find out all about it when he does the TR course.

Happy New Year to all those living in the present and not in the past. Happy though those memories may be.


G

:ok:

not a very likely event:ok:

The point that I'm trying to make, probably rather clumsily, is this: new types/technologies can provide new solutions/procedures to old problems.

For the night ejectee scenario on a flat-calm night, where references will be virtually nil at the necessary high hover height, modern systems allow perfectly acceptable lateral pilot control and accurate height-holding (with no 'top-box' limits) using AFCS modes which can be easily overridden if a faster movement is required. The absence of doppler removes the risk of flat-surface 'unlock', sea movement error etc. That, to my mind, is a far better way of dealing with this scenario than using 'hover trim' in a modern system, whereas HT is doubtless the best procedure in the SK with its more restricted AFCS.

In the scenario of a rapidly- and randomly-moving small (but possibly tall) vessel, especially at night, HT might indeed be the most suitable mode to use on a modern type, but it might be equally appropriate to use a pilot-controlled lateral mode - with accurate automatic heightkeeping without practical restriction - which the pilot is able to easily modify if the vessel's movement requires it. With a lot of cable out, this approach can also minimise the likelihood of a significant swing for the winchman.

As I said, different technologies can provide different 'best ways' of doing business. The trick, of course, is to continue those 'best ways' where appropriate while avoiding the assumption that all of those 'best ways' MUST transfer between types/technologies.

Anyway, Happy New Year to all, and best wishes in particular to all the military SAR operators who will be facing a pretty tough time over the next couple of years. Keep up the good work regardless; your customers will appreciate it.

Louis - I see where you are coming from but the weak link in your proposition is the pilot - no matter how good his autopilot and 'fly through' modes of operation are - he can't see what is happening beneath the aircraft and so any response of his is 'lagged' by the time the winch op recognises and verbalises the correction required.

The winchop's Hover Trim on the new aircraft will give him sufficient authority through the clever autopilot to move the aircraft precisely to assist the winchman.

There is often some manoeuvering required for a night wet (or day for that matter) as the winchop needs to keep the cable in such a position that it doesn't hinder or endanger the winchman or casualty whilst the casualty is prepared for lift.

The pilot can establish the aircraft in an autohover and then verbally give control to the winchop - I don't think this will be done any differently in the new aircraft, they just won't have to fret about doppler mislocks or spend ages trimming the aircraft to a relative hover.

All the new technology is in the aircraft, not where the winchman is working.

BTW the 3A Sea King, although still doppler based, has a more flexible, digital SN500 AFCS with few of the limitations of the mk31 FCS I think you are remembering.

Out of interest, on the Bristow roadshow the accuracy of the autohover was stated to be such that it could keep the aircraft in a 1-metre cube of space - that is impressive but still not accurate enough for precision winching and it is still only a datum from which you have to manoeuvre to compensate for wind, tide, downdraught, sea movement etc. I know you can give it vectors to compensate for steady state drift, for example, but responding to a messy sea with random waves breaking is beyond even that tech.

New technology is great but it isn't a panacea for SAR.

Things do change
 

"As I said, different technologies can provide different 'best ways' of doing business. The trick, of course, is to continue those 'best ways' where appropriate while avoiding the assumption that all of those 'best ways' MUST transfer between types/technologies."

LN, I agree with you entirely but there will be many old dogs who will argue (I think there may be a few on here) that why try and reinvent the RAF SAR wheel.

I can't remember the name of the yank who closed down a US patent office in 1899 or thereabouts saying "everything that can be invented has been".

Having used the old doppler system and the newer AFCS in the modern SAR a/c I disagree with crab that the w/op is best placed to conduct that type of job. In some cases he MAY be but the built in delay can make the job harder and with the presentation the pilot now has in front of him he can tell exactly where the a/c is going and what speed and has the ability to change that in an instant rather than waiting the few seconds it takes for the Winch/op system.

Maybe some of the older RAF SAR crews can tell us whether the procedures that were used on the Whirlwind, Wessex were different to the SK days.

Happy new year.

Jeepys - please explain the 'built-in delay' in the AFCS system.

Louisnewmark
 

It would seem to me that the winch operator who has direct visual contact with the survivor is able to provide a better service to the winchman rather than the service provided via a pilot looking at instruments? However, I do agree that we should not be constrained by old habits/old technology. Anyway, good luck to all involved in SAR in the coming years.
Leo
PS not just AHT on Sea Kings;Super Puma and Cormorant too.

It is worth pointing out that although the use of AHT/Crew Hover in UK civilian SAR is part of the training requirement, the majority of winch operators will achieve their currency on drums without exploring the system's capabilities on wets or decks.


Many aircraft commanders would not expect their winch operator to do any more than deliver the hi-line were the system to be used on decks with the evolution flown manually once the hi-line is established. Should AHT/Crew Hover be used on wets, a significant number of winch operators would ask their pilot to provide the winching inputs (on the winch operator's command) as they do on drums, rather than overloading themselves with both aircraft control and winch operation.


AHT/Crew Hover is therefore not a well-used feature. The differences in approach between military and civilian SAR crews (detailed above), combined with the effectiveness of the AHRS-based autohovers, a lack of user confidence and some ergonomic challenges may go some way to explaining why the pilot retaining control appears to be the preferred method in the civilian world.

really?????? overloading themselves???? an LCR winchman can do hover trim wets in secondary role in the RAF.....no wonder the payscales in UKSAR are set low for rearcrew:{

AHT/Crew hov
 

Hi guys,

Happy New Year all!

Crab - having done ejectee jobs from RAF Sea Kings, and S-92s (as a WinchMan) I can say from experience, the service provided from an AHRS based 'V-HOLD' with Pilot flying in a 200' hover is as good, if not better than than doing the same thing on AHT in a SeaKing. I've also operated both sytems as a WinchOp. The lag that you talk about by having the Pilot make the inputs is insignificant in practice. What kind of target are you talking about that is moving so rapidly that these fractions of a second are going to make such a difference to the service provided? Don't forget WinchOps can anticipate and give directions early if they feel the required inputs are being made too slowly by the Pilot. But as I said, this is insignificant in practise, and never enough to make crew hov a better option.

Also, in response to 'I have grave concerns about their motivation to go that extra mile beyond the minimum spec in the contract'

- Don't be concerned. I will alway go the extra mile and risk my arse as much as is required on a job (as I'm sure any of my fellow civvy rearcrew will also). But during training and with only the same amount of sick pay as an office worker, I won't take any risks.:)

Thinking about those HD cameras pointing down below the aircraft. I'm sure it would be possible using current image processing and electo-optical direction technology (to say nothing of reversing cameras on cars or Hawk Eye at Wimbledon!) to provide information/direction during a rescue? Set it to track casualty/boat/winchman and the crew could set 'avoid' areas or 'capture' areas and let the system provide cues one way or another, or even send direct inputs into the flight control system (I know, a _lot_ of work would be required before the latter would be a goer).

Dunno if it would be a help (less things to worry about) or a hindrance (more to monitor or go wrong) but it could be explored.

Very amusing
 

Having experienced military SAR, HMCG SAR and O/G SAR. I find that having a browse of this thread now and again makes me giggle, a great deal of "willy swinging" and an entire new class of "sciolists" (a term that I was introduced to by an ex RAF colleague), very befitting of a great many posters on here.

Extract below taken from an Internet site well versed on the subject:

A sciolist is a person with a “smattering” knowledge who pretends to be an expert on some subject. Sciolists can be easily identified by their vociferous use of dazzling buzz words coupled with an ability to speak authoritatively and with conviction while at the same time not actually saying anything or providing information not already obvious.

Sciolism is a form of deceit which automatically engenders a level of paranoia and I suspect sciolists are natively insecure and therefore especially defensive/offensive lest they be found out. The attitude displays an enormous hubris in that sciolists presuppose their own life experiences are somehow more valuable to the discussion than the rest of the public. In fact, sciolists by intruding and inserting their shallow “expertise” into deeply complex issues have been and are potentially very damaging.

I wish you all well for 2015, please continue the "willy swinging" and re-inventing the SAR wheel......very entertaining :}:}:}

Skystalker - I bow to your experience and expertise - it is really of no concern to me as I have and will not have any further input to UKSAR.

As an ageing parent, I completely understand how irrelevant past experience is to the brave new generation so, please be my guest, re-invent the wheel and let the new UKSAR be judged by its own merits and performance.

Good luck.

Crab......Dude!, I wasn't trying to start another crab@ beating session. I happen to agree with a lot of your comments on here. I just felt that some of your comments on the current topic, whilst authoritative, isn't the full picture either.

Past lessons and experience play a very important part in the way we do business. We're not trying to reinvent the wheel. But with a different machine, some techniques have evolved or just need to be done differently.


Angel - If you re-read your post, I think you'll find you're guilty of the very thing you're trying to accuse others of.

You've told us about your 'experience', (although, abit of Navy SAR, a few months in Sumburgh then Jigsaw means you've probably done a handful of jobs at the most)

You vociferously have used the buzz word 'Sciolist' and have cut and paste someone else's work and are holding it up as if it's in someway your thoughts

You also have'nt actually added anything to the subject being discussed. You have just posted to have a dig at others.

PPRuNe rocks!:)

Bait cast.......first "SAR expert" takes a bite :E

I must humbly apologise for my lack of experience and slither back to the rock from under which I crawled.

I must also sincerely apologise for cutting and pasting the humouros description of a "sciolist" that I found on the Internet, which does appear to hit a raw nerve :E

Sky stalker, You obviously know who I am; as I never mentioned that I was in the "senior service":}

I shall leave you all to it and await further torrents of abuse from the other connoisseurs of SAR.....please don't wait around for a further retort, you won't get one as I tend to get into trouble for posting my opinions of civSAR on prune:*

Let's get back to how to re-invent SAR........:ok:

SkyStalker,


I was unaware that an S-92 had been used in rescuing an RAF ejectee. When and where was this?
Please don't think I am questioning your integrity; I am genuinely interested.


Subsequently edited this as I believe the S92 was used in the Moray rescue in 2012. Have there been others?

Was this not the one?

BBC News - Tornado jet crew eject before aircraft crashes

That was the one I was referring to hilife

Skystalker - I haven't operated the S92 so I can only accept your findings but tell me, do you use 'crew hover' for night wets - as you know that was SOP for the Sea King. As for quick response, drums or wets in a big or confused sea usually meant you were behind the drag curve up front and AHT/HT was often the best method. By the time the winchop had said "Forward 1" it was time for "Back 5" as the wave broke.

BTW, particularly amused you have 'outed' Angel for his lack of SAR experience - he is indeed the sciolist in the room:ok:

Crabbage - Let me just say, I am not an expert on the 92, nor am I particularly experienced at SAR.

It's not a hard and fast SOP that we will default to 'crew hov' to do Night wets/drums. The option is there if you feel it will provide a better service to the w/man in the prevailing conditions. However, we are required to train with it as part of our ongoing currency requirements.

Thanks - it will be interesting to see what the very experienced guys make of it later in the year when they come across on managed transition.