Air Corps SAR

Would they still use the same type helicopter at all four bases?

AFAIK there are five S92s, to allow the rotation of one at a time through maintenance while still having one at all four bases.

This maintainence schedule is straightforward if all helicopters are the same but woud need all crew trained and certified on more than one model if they were not all the same.

The coast guard currently have five S92 medium lift helicopters, EI-ICG, EI-ICU, EI-ICA, EI-ICS, EI-ICD. At any one time four are operational and one available for redundancy or scheduled maintenance.

Say at the moment EI-ICG, EI-ICU, EI-ICA, EI-ICS are operational and EI-ICD is undergoing scheduled maintenance.

EI-ICG is rotated out for scheduled maintenance and replaced by EI-ICD.

When EI-ICG maintenance is complete, EI-ICU is rotated out for scheduled maintenance and replaced by EI-ICG

etc...

Any one helicopter isn't tied to a particular base. Over time any or all helicopters may rotate through all bases.

Therefore all SAR pilots would need to be type rated for all helicopter types used.

There's operational efficiencies in using all the same type helicopter, operational flexibility, pilots, crew, maintenance, spare parts that would need strong reasons to depart from.

When did Cork move to the West Coast?

Are you counting from order to delivery or are you talking about all the time before that while the project was being debated (see the MRV for the ultimate example of that), if the AC is going to take over Top Cover in 5 years then MM is going to have to order the ball to start rolling now for that to be possible imo, and given how “slow” things are going as is…

I stand by my view that the “5 years” is to throw a bone to those that were demanding that the AC should be doing it all, but in 5 years time we will be told “well the private contractor is already doing it”.

How are we on establishment right now? How many pilots do we have in the pipeline?

How did faith work out for the extra hull for the NS? Hell how did the attempt to get the CASAs work out, or the extra PC12 that was on offer?

In an ideal or even semi normal attitude to defence I’d say buy 3 Falcons, use one for government needs and everything else, and have 2 for top cover and support for other duties. But that’s not the situation we have with Irish defence is it? The reality is we are under strength as is and supping out training to other nations to try and reduce the shortages and only a few years ago we had issues manning the medical flight, so the idea of rapidly scaling up to support a Top Cover within 5 years isn’t likely. Certainly not with the abject failure to address any of the retention issues already.

To me it goes hand in hand, given the lead times for most equipment procurement we have the time to scale the people up, but buying the equipment and hoping the powers that be figure out that more people are needed hasn’t worked out for us so far?

It's almost routine now to see a high court challenge to large public contracts by the runner-up. And so the loser ultimately is the taxpayer, who has to defend all of them.

There needs to be some sort of independent review body, like the Labour Court but for procurement, where a panel is assembled of expert practitioners and these things can be adjudicated without filling the high court lists.

It’s not just limited to us, you only have to look at pretty much any defence contract particularly in the US to see such legal action after a tender no matter what. I’m sure if we were handing out any big contracts for non domestic procurement we would see the same.