Rio Grande is approx. 370 nm
Safer for fuel reserve.
I guess they will let you land in matters of life and death.
Altough there is another democratic chosen boss in Argentina, they still roar when they are in economic down turn. This might slacken a bit now the oil exploration around the Falklands is not a complete succes.
However there might be a slight chance you have to leave the cab behind and take the airliner back. 😁😁

RGA - BUE - SCL - MPN. Make sure you take a few quit travel money with you or have your card loaded. Probably easier to fly to your head office to talk to your boss.

Cheers SLB

Heard a rumour that Bristow are going for complete S-92 fleet because AW189 further delayed.....

Not sure if that will also affect the Falklands SAR contract which is supposed to be using AW189.

Also heard disturbing rumblings about how some ex-mil pilots may have used some poetic licence on their CVs regarding glass cockpit time and SAR experience and that a potenial senior pilot had struggled to get qualified..........

Just rumours of course......nothing like that could be true.......could it???:E

I've heard that two have already been delivered.

G-SAAR and G-FSAR are sitting in a hangar at Newquay (St Mawgan to you Crab), complete and making ready for a trip south. They are ITALIAN-MADE AW189 SAR version. :ok:

G-MCGY and G-MCGZ are at another hangar at Newquay doing the work-up to take over from Culdrose shortly.

G-MCGG is believed to have gone to Prestwick with Craig and all that Stornoway practice hasn't been wasted after all. :E

G-MCGL is brand new and believed to be at Dyce being wrapped in Christmas paper with Prestwick's name on it. :) More to come?


As posted by me elsewhere.
"Can you imagine how bad it is going to look for AW (Agusta Westland) if a second SAR contract is late because of problems with their aircraft? If they can make sure that the AW189 starts on time in the Falklands then it's all about Bristow. If the AW189 doesn't start on time in the Falklands then it's all about Agusta Westland. So how important is it to them that the Falklands aircraft are right?"


The fundamental resilience that the two types provide to this service has been important from the start. This was amplified in late 2012 when the DfT dictated the number of aircraft. On top of that there is the Government's need to make Westland a proper aircraft manufacturer. (Oops. Did I say that out loud?)

Major fail on the last point since the only AW189 SAR ready to go into service are Italian-made. :ugh:

If S-92A becomes permanent for the entire service then the service will be degraded in performance and degraded in resilience. It will be obvious that the Government has given the contract to the wrong contractor. You have to ask if the senior management of Bristow SAR had the rotor experience and the bare-knuckle commercial horse-sense to make the AW189 programme work on the available timescale. If they didn't then it really isn't all about AW. If they didn't, how does that compare with what was told to the DfT during the bid? :ugh:


(And don't take anything Bristow tell you about the Falklands too seriously!)

Having the aircraft ready to ship and having them operational isn't quite the same thing but we will have to wait and see - I had heard there was a further delay in the icing clearance due to the addition of an external handhold........I believe 1564 Flt are readying the contingency plans to extend if required - some fudging required with the Design Authority apparently.

We have seen from the Bristow UK SAR experience why one needs contingency plans. In the Falklands, without the scale of local aviation infrastructure we are accustomed to in the UK, I expect there may be more than one level of contingency.

Crab, no icing issue with FI Aircraft. But they are LIPS not FIPS which BHL require and the FI aircraft have no requirement for an additional hand hold. Training is continuing with crews at NQY with no major risk to ISD.

Contingencies were required from both the Contractor and JFC by DES MoD. The contractor contingency is in place, you may have heard about the thought process JFC are going through for their contingency.

Understood, does that mean that the UK ones do have a problem because they do require the handhold and FIPS?

Diverging (geographically) slightly, I see both Caernarfon and Humberside have had a couple of distance taskings in the past 24hrs (N.I. & I.O.M). I'm guessing Humberside got the latter because the Caernarfon crew were out of duty time.

So Humberside go to IOM.......where does that leave the rest of the East Coast for SAR cover????

Out of duty time????on SAR?????WTF?? Must be the brave new world.

That would surely count as being off-state and attract contract penalties wouldn't it??

What is their max duty time??

Crab, I am not au fait with Bristow's ConOps, hence I said I was guessing at the "out of duty" time. It was a long old haul for Caernarfon. Likewise I have no insight into contractural matters so cannot answer your question on penalties etc.. (Maybe JIMF has the answer as he seems to have an inside line on these things)


Your point on East Coast SAR cover is however, most valid.

Does this also not demonstrate the greater flexibility of modern, high speed RIPS equipped aircraft?

So just how fatigued were you allowed to fly CRAB?

No it demonstrates that the UK SAR service is spread too thinly.

Never Fretter - as you know, fatigue is a very subjective thing to assess and varies from person to person and from day to day with those same people - however, when urgent lifesaving was required, it came down to the crew (not just the captain) to decide if they were fit to perform the rescue.

During the Gloucester floods, one crew flew 12 hours continuously - yes they were tired at the end but they didn't pull stumps and go home just because they were at the technical end of crew duty time.

Many mil SAR crews will have flown multiple jobs in a duty period - especially in the Summer or periods of very bad weather - the point of SAR was that you didn't operate like an airline, it was a military organisation which allowed self-regulation within broad crew duty limits and the ability of the crew or senior management to extend those limits if the situation required.

Have I flown when fatigued? Yes. Were the risks mitigated as much as possible by the crew? Yes. Did we have any accidents or incidents operating that way? None that could be directly attributed to fatigue.

Now the brave new world might see SAR differently and insist that it is conducted within stricter civilian rules and regs - if that is the way it must be then so be it but if it compromises the quality of SAR service and UK cover then not much will have been achieved by the contractorisation will it?

Edward - both NI and IOM were normal jobs for the flight at Valley so why would it be a long drag for Caernafon?

Just how fast could the Inverness or Lydd aircraft fly if en route to an incident in Humberside's patch?

..and the only way you are going to be able to quantify that last sentence is by the number of lives not saved, searches not conducted or transfers not carried out, that you can prove would have been carried out, under the MilSar system.

Oh, and I suppose you can chuck in some cost calculation for good measure! :ok:

The only arbiter of relative success at the moment is the ARCCK but even that will disappear once it moves to MCA control.

ARCCK of course will not be allowed to comment but rumours abound about quality of service.

When the MCA are marking their own homework there will be little flow of information other than statistical breakdown of callouts.

Inverness? Modern world response from Prestwick, Lydd or Caernarfon. (West coast aircraft with deicing up over the top and let-down over the sea.)


I hear you Crab. But the RAF were marking their own card previously and before 1979 there was no Fleet Air Arm connection whatsoever and before 2010 there was no MCA connection. No matter how well-informed you might regard yourself and former colleagues, only subtle back-room links were available to many involved parties. In spite of my own links, in relation to one important incident in the military SAR helicopter world I received reports through an aviator from another country.

MCA Aviation have started their new publicly available reporting system and I applaud that move.
https://www.gov.uk/government/statis...september-2015
https://www.gov.uk/government/statis...icopter-sarh01
Even without that new source we know that the contractor is doing a sh1t load of jobs with some bases exceed the previous military numbers. Sorry mate, but the question that might have to be asked is what were the military doing that prevented tasks. The age and capability of the aircraft has to be questioned. That stretches back some years and stretches forward to next year in respect of 1564.

With respect to MCA Aviation at ARCC Fareham, I hope those here who have continued involvement will keep asking searching questions and keep up positive engagement so that we will see a 21st century approach to an important public service with the Open Government principle fully engaged.

Lies, damn lies and statistics Jim but if that floats your boat then fine - it doesn't tell you much apart from what jobs were completed.

You seem to believe the RIPS is the be all and end all but it only sheds ice from the rotor, any ice on the airframe will continue to accrete and that has often been the most dangerous as it adds massively to the AUM and you simply run out of power. A simple up and over in winter won't be that simple and if the job is overland, you still have to get down using ATC or a coastal letdown. And remember 139 and 189 don't have that.

There was a very free flow of information between the milsar flights and the ARCCK and comments and feedback were encouraged by both sides to improve the service - whether or not the same Form R system is implemented by the new service I don't know.

Because there was no incentive to keep information from outside agencies because none of it was commercially sensitive (being off-state for example) there was no need for fudging stats or obfuscation with the RCS.

Despite your optimism, I keep hearing negative reports about many aspects of the new service which I do balance against the fact that they are still rescuing people.

Crab,

please share the negative reports so the better informed can either agree or put the record straight.

Nice idea but some of those people have careers and jobs to protect - so no.

What?



That balance Crab: do hold that thought.

I could give you negative reports from CivSAR recently and going back a quarter of a century if I thought that there was any point when I know that people have taken things on-board and set on improvement and, as you say, balance against the fact that they are still rescuing people.

Likewise in the MilSAR, how many broken aircraft, bad comms, new boys making wise but restrictive decisions about their own capabilities, and my all-time favourite, telling us they had to leave the exercise early for an appointment elsewhere and then being spotted having lunch in a nice hotel (a bit obvious with something yellow occupying a large part of the car park visible from miles away).

Key to what is happening just now is new boys making wise but operationally restrictive decisions about their own capabilities. The knowledge pool for the Westland Sea King under military flying rules is immense but the knowledge pool for S-92A under CAP 999 and various OSR and so on is still small. Likewise, the knowledge pool for AW189 under the same regime is as yet non-existent and by Q3 2016 will still be mainly maritime.

They don't have RIPS - I thought that was reasonably clear - obviously I need to work on my syntax.

Leaving an exercise is hardly making a restrictive decision about the crews capabilities. calling in a flight from the other side of the country to do a job in your own patch, is.

You keep forgetting that the whole concept of the new SAR service was that it would be no less capable - not by the end of the contract but at the beginning. The experience levels are rather variable; there is no LCR to CR syllabus and training budget to address that and the amount of training in role on the new aircraft seems thin.

I have no idea about the 139 spec but 189 LIPS is certified, and 189 FIPS in the loop for cert this winter. LIPS (w/o rotor heat?) is fitted to BIH FISAR aircraft, and the cert conditions are reportedly pretty good.


My main concern regarding training is the long term future for the lads down the back. I still believe that the CAA has missed an opportunity to create a world-class system for SAR rearcrew by having it as a licensed aviation trade that would have produced the sort of standards that MilSAR have developed across generations of bouncing winchies off boats and rocks.

139's on the south coast at Lydd are Lips and the two St. Athan are Fips (full ice protection).

Crab, yawn yawn.

And still the wheels keep turning...............................:zzz:

'telling us they had to leave the exercise early for an appointment elsewhere and then being spotted having lunch in a nice hotel'




You didn't get the hint then?

Jeepys - ISTR that LIPS is no better than a Sea King icing protection and that there were lots of problems with the cables in the blades with the FIPS - perhaps that has been sorted out now.

Still no comeback about some pilots SAR and glass cockpit experience and a struggling chief pilot though...

...except in this case, Caernarfon were already tasked and Prestwick haven't yet entered the modern world. Even when they do, Prestwick will remain one of the busiest units meaning that scope to help out on the east coast will be limited.

Thanks:ok:

Not logging 'stand-downs-before-airborne' as SAROPs?

Well I have heard it all now. A Crab lecturing us all on the flexibility of Crew Duty Time. Laugh - I nearly cried.

Sufficient manoeuvrability to 'mix it' with F-15s? :E

Rescue pilot 'rolled' helicopter to avoid USAF F15 jets - BBC News

I/C

I wonder if the background of the airprox board Chairman had anything to do with the fact that there was low or no risk of collision.

Civilian pilot says the risk was high; mil pilot says risk was negligible.

I've read this sort of comment a lot in reports so it does make you wonder.

What were they doing "just" avoiding a SAR op for anyway? Rubbernecking?:ugh:

Ha Ha :p


"If the S-92 is ‘Helibus’ then the AW189 is expected to be heli-sports-estate: fast and manoeuvrable, with plenty of room in the back for hill stuff." :ok:

Quite.

From NOTAM (TDA) as quoted in AirProx2015121: "PILOTS ARE URGENTLY REQUESTED NOT TO FLY IN OR NEAR THE AREA WITHOUT THE PERMISSION OF AERONAUTICAL RESCUE AND COORDINATION CENTRE"

Crab,
I know a lot of the ex mil pilots do not have much if any glass experience but I am sure they will be fine!

Jeepys, it is the lack of real SAR experience that I find worrying (and the fact that some appear to have been less than truthful about that).

It was Bristow who were specifying glass cockpit time and they made a big deal about it but most people (even me) get used to it very quickly.

They knew the TDA was there and their route avoided it - don't see a problem, especially since the Helo wasn't in the TDA at the time of the incident.

Same again - how nice, I seem to have my very own internet troll.............

No................ You I guess you wouldn't :rolleyes:

If you read the airprox http://www.airproxboard.org.uk/docs/423/2015121.pdf you will see that no-one else thought it was a problem either - someone being a bit precious perhaps?:)

Just checking in now again again Crab to see how sour your grapes are. Don't really have much time for trolling unless, of course, I have downed tools due to FTL limits or icing restrictions and have to go on holiday to spend all the money that Bristow are paying me. How are things in the Corporate/Offshore centre of excellence that you seem to be running these days?

The NOTAM does say "in or near".

And surely if you are in a F-15 doing tactical dodging about stuff at XXX knots through the corries it must be possible to imagine that you present a far greater risk than say a C-130 lumbering past at 5500 feet.

If you want a bigger area of safety you just make the TDA bigger.

The crews saw each other, the TCAS noted their presence and there was a very low risk to either - the heli pilot just overreacted, the estimate was no closer than 500' vertically - you could have that IMC in a procedural hold and no-one airproxes that.

A 4-ship formation takes up a lot more airspace and is less manoeuvreable than a C130.

Same again - Not just a troll then - an ocean-going **** as well - I bet they love you in the crew room on shift :ugh: please feel free to fill in the missing letters:ok: