Okay, thank you.
Obviously the notion of planning goes into making decisions, and we've heard a lot of comments about the 24/7, 30-minute standby requirement. It's a position I support and have been championing for some time.
Some of you asked about the value of a life, or the cost. There are costs to doing different sorts of things, and I'll give you an example. It comes from a report prepared by the Department of National Defence in September 2004.
This is about procurement of fixed-wing search and rescue aircraft. They also studied what the standby posture--the 30-minute standby requirements--would do to the design of the aircraft in planning the program. I want to read what it said specifically, because it would affect the cruise speed of a fixed-wing aircraft. This is from the executive summary. The analysis is later on.
Increasing the number of hours that the SAR standby posture is 30 minutes represents another obvious manner in which the minimum cruise speed can be reduced. The analysis estimated the 30 year cost of various increases to the current 40 hour per week allotment of 30 minute standby. In particular, it was found that the cost of maintaining 30 minute standby 24 hours per day, 7 days per week for 30 years would be in excess of one billion current year dollars. These costs were deemed too prohibitive in light of the fact that the budget for the acquisition of the [fixed-wing search and rescue] aircraft is $1.2 billion.
So $1 billion over 30 years sounds like a lot of money, but when you divide it by 30 years, it works out to $33 million per year for a national program.
I wonder if you'd care to comment on those numbers. This is for fixed-wing aircraft, not helicopters. There may be a different analysis and a different number. But does that number strike you as something that should be regarded by the government as prohibitive if it comes to trying to change to a 24-hour, 30-minute standby response?
Does anyone want to comment on that?