At Valley he works on a shift system. He is part of a team of four, doing eight twenty-four-hour watches a month, and when on duty they live on base next to their helicopters. During the daytime they can be in the air in fifteen minutes, at night-time it's forty-five minutes, and when the scramble bell goes they have no idea what lies ahead of them or where they are headed. It could be anywhere in the UK or beyond, it could be miles out into the Atlantic, it could be to rescue a stricken tanker or a capsized yacht, a walker who is lost and has fallen and broken a limb in the mountains, a heart-attack victim, a fire on an oil rig, or a community that has been cut off by floods and needs evacuating. As William has said, it's the 'fourth emergency service'.
'It doesn't sound very many shifts,' says one of the team, 'but it's very stressful because it's foul weather and you have to work out in double quick time how you're going to get there, how you're going to make your fuel last, how long you can stay over the target area, how many people you can carry, how many you have to rescue, what you strip out etc. They tend to group them in three watches, so three lots of three, or two of three, and that will be twenty-four hours on, twenty-four hours off, so it lasts for a short week, then a gap for three or four days to have a rest, concentrate on your other work, do your helicopter training - training flights continue where you practise with the mountain rescue teams - and then you go back on watch for three days.'
