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Fig. 1: Experienced military personnel who have been conducting SAR operations for many years will be a great asset to Bristow (Photographs: Bristow)
Search and Rescue in the UK: Bristow Helicopters awarded contract to deliver UK SAR Bristow Helicopters Ltd has been awarded the contract to deliver the UK Search and Rescue (SAR) service by the Department for Transport. The company, a leading provider of helicopter services to the offshore energy industry, has won the contract to provide SAR and will take over the running of the service from April 2015 and operate until 2026. The new SAR service will be delivered from 10 bases across the UK. New facilities will be established at Inverness, Manston, Prestwick, Caernarfon, Humberside, Newquay and St Athan, while existing facilities at Lee-on-Solent and Sumburgh will continue to be used, the base at Stornoway being refurbished. For more than half a century, the operation of the UK’s SAR helicopter service has mainly been carried out by the RAF and Royal Navy.
Authors: Editorial Team AirRescue Magazine
Bristow Helicopters will be introducing a state of the art Search and Rescue fleet of Sikorsky S-92s and AgustaWestland AW189s. The new helicopters will feature a raft of technology, some of which is new to commercial Search and Rescue aircraft, and shall enable Bristow Helicopters to provide unprecedented SAR capabilities. Managing director Mike Imlach said: “In designing our Search and Rescue service we were able to start from a clean sheet and choose the best locations and helicopters to service the geographical areas we will be operat-
ing in. The base locations have been strategically selected due to their proximity to areas of high SAR incident rates and will enable the teams to respond to incidents in 85% of high and very high-risk areas within 30 minutes rather than the 70% reachable in this timeframe by the existing service.” Imlach added that Bristow crews “will provide a 24 hour a day, 365 days a year service with the ability to launch within 15 minutes in day time and 45 minutes at night time. This will enable SAR teams to get to an incident on average faster than ever before, and
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