We have been discussing on another post the nature of volunteering in the reserve forces context and the conversation wandered into other forms of volunteering and how that might inform the future reserves.
Someone mentioned the The Royal National Lifeboat Institution as a good example.
RNLI (Click to see how you can help)
Get your wallets out!
RNLI Lifeboat Crew Reaching Out to Royal Navy Rescue Winchman
Perhaps the SAR operations currently currently undertaken by the armed forces could be undertaken of an organisation like RNLI?
That would also build a civilian resevoir of advanced helicopter skills in case of future mobilisation.
Interesting comparison. My Farther was a Lifeboat man for 11 years, having originally trained to be a Radio Officer in the Merchant Navy. That last fact is why he was ideal to join the RNLI. Likewise a lot of the other crew where fishermen and/or grew up in the village. I have another friend who was a lifeboat man. He is a keen surfer and studied under-water photography at University. There aren’t exactly many opportunities to drive a tank in civilian life are there?
The point I’m trying to make is the RNLI is very good at attracting people with the skills it needs to get by. Not that I’m saying every lifeboat man needs to be a surfer or a fisherman, but having those people on the crew is a great help. That is what the reserve forces need to try and do. Look at Civilian skills that have a cross over into Military usage and attract them. To take just one example; Distribution Companies have people skilled in Fleet Management, Route Planning, Vehicle Maintenance etc. There is an obvious cross-over there. The reserve forces should be capable of taking those skills and transforming them into a Military setting. The person gets extra knowledge that can then cross back to civilian life, aiding them there and the Military gets a skilled individual it can call upon when needed.
@Peter Elliot
The MOD are already in the process of handing over SAR responsibilities to the Department of Transport/Maritime and Coastguard Agency.
At the moment, the Royal NAvy and RAF each operate their own SAR Sea Kings. For the RAF these are the only remaining Sea Kings in their inventory and the Royal Navy are due to retire the Commando Sea Kings in a couple of years.
The MCA also runs a couple of its own helicopters (Stornoway, Shetland, Portland and Lee on Solent) – currently a mix of S92s and AW139). These are currently operated under contract by CHC.
A competition was held to find an operator to replace the MOD and MCA SAR forces in one contract. The contract was won by a consortium involving CHC and RBS amongst others. Then very late in the day, RBS informed the Government that someone on the procurement team had been in some sort of contact with CHC during the bidding process. Thus the contract that was supposed to start fairly shortly had to be ripped up.
New interim contracts have been tendered (the existing MCA contract itself was only supposed to be an interim option prior to the handover!). It now sounds like Bristows (another big North Sea operator) will be taking over from CHC.
BP also contracts its own SAR helicopter service (part of JIGSAW) in the North Sea.
So it’s already happening if the Government ever manages to run a competitve tender properly. But I don’t think the reserve element will fit in really.
The RNLI is pretty amazing, but can you really run a SAR business model on relying upon contributions from the public? Helicopters and trained crew are pretty expensive. Not many people like the idea of extorting money from those who are rescued either…
SAR is one of those things that have a very soft ‘economic return’ in my mind. It means that the profit motive should be kept to a minimum or someone should be willing to pay a lot of money for a good service. As the Commons committees keep saying, privatising SAR carrys a lot of risk which the MOD has successfully handled for many years. I would say there is a good argument for saying it is not a Defence mission, but I still can’t see the private companies providing the service in a way that does not eventually fail, either in the equipment or rescuing people sense at somepoint in the future… Greed wins out over altruism, the RNLI is an exception to this rule.
The various Air Ambulance Services around the UK are charities so there is some precendent for the charitable operation of helicopters.
http://www.airambulanceassociation.co.uk/amazing_facts.php
I would say there is a good argument for saying it is not a Defence mission, but I still can’t see the private companies providing the service in a way that does not eventually fail, either in the equipment or rescuing people sense at somepoint in the future…
There’s surely a training argument, though? If we’re going to want to rescue downed pilots and evacuate injured sailors and so on in wartime, then we’ll need trained navy (or RAF or army) rotorheads to do it. And when there isn’t a war, they can keep current by pulling yachtsmen out of the Solent or climbers out of Zero Gully.
But instead civilian SAR seems to have no overlap in crews or TTPs at all with military CSAR or MERT operations…
There is also a big difference between Air Ambulance operations and Search and Rescue, which has a big influence on viability for funding. The Air Ambulance role is quite simple really, it consists of getting a phone call, and going from point A, to B, collect patient, and fly to the Hospital, point C. It is typically performed by a light helicopter, typically something like the MD Explorer, AW-109, Eurocopter EC-135. In contrast, the Search and Rescue role consists of flying much longer distances, and trying to find someone or something, often in bad weather. It is typically performed by much larger helicopters, more like the Sea King, S-92, and the AW-139 is at the bottom of the viable size range. As such, you have an aircraft that costs five to ten times as much, needs twice the crew, and costs much per hour to fly, and you need to fly it much further. All in all, you are probably talking about overall costs not far off an order of magnitude more expensive.
As such, it is very unlikely that a charitably run SAR service is viable. Frankly, it is pretty amazing that enough people dig deep into their pockets enough, and enough people volunteer their time, to enable the RNLI!