Busiest UK Search & Rescue base to move

The Royal Navy's SAR unit at Prestwick is the busiest, but will move in 2012.

Gary Parsons - 16-Mar-2010

Royal Navy image

March 16: Despite the Royal Navy’s search and rescue (SAR) unit at HMS Gannet, located within Ayr’s Prestwick Airport in Scotland being the UK’s busiest, it is to close and move to Glasgow Airport under the government’s new SAR contract to be let to Soteria from 2012.

Figures released yesterday by the Navy’s Fleet Air Arm say that the unit from Prestwick responded to 447 call outs in 2009, 65 more than the previous record of 382 in 2008 and almost 20% of the total for the whole of the UK. In 2009 378 people were assisted.

The crews at HMS Gannet cover an area of some 98,000 square miles of northern England and Northern Ireland, as well as Scotland – from Edinburgh in the east, to the Inner Hebrides in the west, and Ben Nevis in the north to the Lake District in England, as well as all of Northern Ireland and a large sea area of 200 miles out into the Atlantic off the Irish and Scottish shores.

Under the Ministry of Defence’s (MoD) new SAR contract, search and rescue services will be moved from Prestwick to Glasgow Airport sometime after 2012. BBC Scotland reports that local politicians described the decision as "an absolute outrage", with fears of the future of HMS Gannet and job losses in the Ayr area. The MoD has said that the decision on basing lies with the contractor but that the new S-92 helicopters would be significantly faster than the Sea Kings they are replacing, allaying any fears of the unit moving further away from Northern Ireland and the Lake District.

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