Jim Roberts on Saving Lives at Sea

The Coastguard helicopters, in fact all the helicopters around the UK, because some are Royal Naval and some are RAF and this has changed over recent years and they are now all run by the Coastguard, but they were all controlled by a Control Station which was up in Scotland for a whole number of years.

However, that has recently been changed and that is now down on the south coast at the UK Headquarters near Swanwick, so yeah, that’s basically how the helicopters are called out.

They are actually on call 24 hours a day, but usually they’re crewed from early morning ‘till the middle of the evening then overnight they’re on .. they actually call it 45-minute readiness which means if they get a call the crew have to be got out of bed to get to the airfield and then get the helicopter in the air.

Although it was known as 45-minute readiness, they usually manage to do it much, much quicker than that and you could get a helicopter in the air in 20-25 minutes at night.