out and about - 2016
14 February 2016 .............. G-CILN
Coming back from a bike ride, and coming down through lower Porthcawl - and there is a helicopter sitting on the grass - along with two fire engines, an RNLI Support vehicle, and lots of RNLI people dressed in rescue gear.
Naturally my curiosity got the better of me, and I stopped to see what was going on.
It turned out that it was a training exercise, and the RNLI people were all getting hoisted up into the helicopter, then lowered back down again.
They all had a go at this one by one, so it went on for half an hour or so, then the helicopter was up and away - however the training exercise wasn`t over, as they went out over the sea, and proceeded to lower someone from the helicopter down into the RNLI inshore lifeboat that was moving at speed, as you can see from the wake.
I have to add that it is quite surprising that these pictures worked, they were quite far out, I was using the maximum zoom on my camera, and really didn`t have time to do any setting up of the shots - but they did.
After that they did the reverse and lifted somebody up out of the lifeboat, however they were by now right round and out beyond the harbour wall, so I couldn`t really get a view of what was happening, and I was looking straight into the sun, so no photographs of this.
When Bristows were awarded the contract to provide the UK wide Search and Rescue helicopter service, there was quite a lot of reservations voiced about a private company providing the Search and Rescue service, including by myself.
One of the things I queried was what would happen about training exercises, as they cost money, and we are talking about a profit driven organisation running the service.
So it is good to see that they are doing this.
The Search and Rescue service in the South Wales area is based in St Athan, and G-CILN is one of two Augusta Westland 139 helicopters based there, the other one is G-CILP, and they started operating in October 2015.
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