Air Farce?

A farmer at Great Barrier Island has successfully salvaged one very expensive sea boat lost from HMNZS Canterbury a week ago by risking life and limb to swim out through the cold surf and tie a line onto the boat, retrieving it by tractor. Doubt that he will ever get to claim salvage rights.

I would have thought that SAR could have used the loss of these boats as a very good exercise in plotting where a craft might go. Weather has been very predictable, onshore easterlies and the boat was lost between Tauranga and Auckland - simple.

Where was the Air Force? They used to have extremely good tracking aircraft that should have been able to locate this boat last week in short order. The weather has been relatively benign in the area since the storm.

A prime example of how useless our Air Force has become.