Yes, they were expensive although it's a long time ago so I can't remember the exact figures; but I'm not sure if we could have run a 1000 person ship's company through the 90s for a lower cost thant the 'hawks And, it would ahve been politically impossible under the then government. The Lynx of the time was not nearly as capable although it would have fitted the (later) requirement which ended up in the Seasprite acquistion. In many ways the FAA would probably have preferred the Lynx for that; after all they had been dealing with Westlands in its various forms for decades. Really, though, after the OPC was cancelled in 96 or whenever we should have bough more Seahawk series, Foxtrots maybe.
One of the main drivers behind the combat system changes our Seahawk was to enable it to be flown by a single pilot (which also meant that the TACCO in the left hand seat had to know how to at least put it down on the back end safely, an issue in itself); with the direct FMS buy of USN clone Romeos they've presumably gone back to a four person crew which will add to overall through life costs I imagine.
The S-70B has been a pretty good buy overall, though - it's done us proud in a lot of difficult places around the world. I don't think its availability was quite what the RAN would have wished over the years, but then the 16 we bought were really only meant to fly off 6 decks for 20 years not the 14 we had available for a while, and with a service life of nearly 30 years.
The concept of a flight parent squadron which was also the training squadron, which I think generally worked OK, wasn't however as successful as the front line/second line approach we'd used in the past and which they've now adopted for Romeo. A bit of a case of back to the future there.
