I think that this sounds good on the surface but is not well thought out.

1) as the other person said before, their are maintenance intensive...
and expensive.

2) Keeping crews current for relief work, ESPECIALLY low level SAR kind
of stuff is going to be difficult.

3) Leave medivac to the trained, professional and CURRENT flight and
medical crews.. civilian or military. More than a few hospitals on the
RECIEVING end of such flights (especially pads on top of buildings) have
individual qualification and insurance requirements for use of the close
in pads.

4) Dont count on free labor. You get what you pay for (not discounting
the quality at all... but if you are under "pressure" to keep the bird
flying or mission ready then you need to have a paid maintenance crew or
contractor who is dedicated to ensuring the bird is ready for callout.
Museum pieces dont tend to have critical mission readiness needs and the
guys comin to "work" on them are doing it for FUN and personal
enrichment. Start putting time pressure on it and FUN turns to work.

Dave

Clayton Ashley wrote:
I want to know what you guys think of trying to relieve a little of
the Op Tempo on our military by creating a mission specific helicopter
medevac/relief group?
The Presidential fleet is retiring its VH-3 helos. I think they
would be great as flood/Hurricane/tornado medevac in places like
Florida/Haiti/Honduras. I was involved in the start up of a museum for
WW2 warbirds and the old mechanics came out of the woodwork to work on
them again for free. I think the same could be done for staffing a new
organization that uses these helos for relief work. As long as they
were fed well and the crews were taken care of, I think retired pilots
and mechanics would love to do something like this. The big benifit
would be taking our overused military out of the requirement.
I am sure there are a bunch of people that want these helos. But I
think it would only need to use 4 or so of the 11 that are retiring.
What do you guys think?
Clayton