What I find interesting is the juxtaposition of this discussion with:
https://army.ca/forums/threads/64037/post-1513880.html#msg1513880
I have no doubt (shaped by my past experience) that there are those in the Navy that feel exactly that way... there are hangars on there, so we need an Air Det. Of course it can be done, but the timing is less than perfect, to say the least.
The last flight of a Sea King on the East Coast has been reported as this month... the retirement is on the West Coast at the end of this year (
http://skr18.ca/, which I know for a fact SeaKingTacco is well aware of
They are trying to get Cyclone IOC by this summer and the first CPF HelAirDets out the door. Some of the same people who are doing that would also have to be pulled aside to do Asterix SHOL.
On top of that, where would the det come from? Shearwater is authorized for 15 det equivalents in 11 dets (the "280" and tanker dets being larger); however, some of those very line numbers have been used up meeting needs of the center (the biggest example being the never ending expanding empire of ADM(IM)), so the plan will have to be reworked at some point. In the '90s we could comfortable field 11 dets (5 steamer/CPF, 1 280, 1 tanker on the east coast plus 1 280, 1 tanker, and 2 CPF/steamer west); when I left we were hovering just below 6, plus the training squadron and HOTEF were not as robustly manned (12 AMS had to stay largish just to keep putting Sea Kings through 2nd line so it didn't all collapse). So to create a Asterix (or AOPS) det would necessarily mean less CPF dets, or something else like training would have to give.
The navy didn't seem to understand that they had a role to play in this. A core part of generating MH aircrew and techs is Sea Time, yet there always seemed to be a background fight along the lines of "we need dets for deployments... we can't afford to send ships to sea for Air training..." It was sort of a macro version of "the SOA won't allow time for helo deck evs because we need time for engineering delaying drills; why can't you Air guys understand training is important!"
The worst case, and this leads directly back to the USN Strategic Readiness Review, is that sometime this year some type of op (humanitarian perhaps?) comes up, and the brain trust convinces themselves that the risk is manageable to "stick a couple of helos on there" even though the trials, approvals, documentation, and (in my mind, most importantly) readiness isn't done...
On a different note, I notice that in the article FSS talks about workshops, etc for the air dept. I wonder if those are the same type as on the CPF, or more like the old tankers? If the latter there seems to be another disconnect. Back when we truly had a Canadian Task Group the tanker did 2nd line maintenance at sea for the helos, hence all the workshops. There was a time when they actually sailed with a two shift 2nd line maintenance crew plus a small section of techs for 1st line (ie flying ops); they also only had 1 and a half crews (so you had a crew plus an LSO and a little bit of flexibility). The maintenance concept was the other ships would only do first line and small sup checks. If your helo broke or needed a large sup you'd swap it with the tanker, who had three of them. They would fix it and then had a maintenance test flight to get it airborne again. It meant the steamers could sustain 12 hour deck cycles longer. The 280s also were plused up and had two shifts to support the 2 helos as well, so they could sustain 18 hours a day in a 12 hour block... all of this with the goal of the task group keeping 2 in the screen continuously. The reason I bring it up is because if someone recreated the old tanker aviation spaces (which haven't been used that way in over 25 years) it's interesting because the Cyclone maintenance concept isn't set up to support that.
