In reply to andrew ogilvie:
Though had the dog jumped to its death due to being scarred witless by the helicopter hovering overhead, I doubt the footage would have been released.
Was it as spontaneous as the MCA press release suggests. The dawg was widely reported on social media as being 'stuck' including a pretty good location description. So I suspect the crew knew it was there, and deliberately went looking, whether they were sanctioned to from management for the PR value as part of the training, or whether they did it adhoc to fill the time while waiting to go back and pick up the crew members who were training on the ground we will never know. It did undoubtedly provided a very good search training target; ?lack of accurate grid, interpretation/matching location description to crag features while on the move with no comm's feed back/directions available from the caz location, done from a different perspective from where the location description was written, followed by visual and thermal search, for a small immobile caz half covered in snow, with limited colour/shape contrast, similar in size to a young child. The imaging capabilities are pretty bloody impressive....... if that dog had stayed quiet you or I could have climbed the adjacent gully and not even known it was there, so to my untrained eye a good 'spot', and good training. During part of the day there were two sets of training going on simultaneously caz care and air to ground comm's, and search practice in the air.....so I think we got excellent value for society's tax contributions.
I would like to think if the dawg had started to look like it might jump the crew would have stood-off, got a 10 or 12 figure grid and passed it on to Cairngorm MRT, who could have got it on foot (if they so chose to), but given away the lions share of the 'glory' from the MCA/crew. In retrospect that probably would have been the more sensible option....... discuss?
I agree with you the SAR helicopters are being 'milked' for all the good PR the MCA can get, but that is no different to what the RN / RAF used to do. The MCA press office however are more inclined to try and get a safety message in at the same time. With regard to the bust up over non caz extraction flying, it should be a relatively simple thing to sort (or have now been sorted)....though yes it should have been sorted a long time ago and before it got to public whingeing.