attractive options - Police Aviation News

Police Aviation News May 2011 4
UNITED KINGDOM
NATIONAL: It is still very silent in the National Police Aviation Service [NPAS] world but
rumour has it that there are things going on in the background. The plan appears to be that
nothing should be said anywhere in public lest someone criticise the content – quite understandable
as this is something that has generally been happening wholesale with every
rare utterance.
It may be distracting to learn that rumours suggest that the type of activity being undertaken
seems to be the sort of enquiries that we might have expected were a pre-requisite for the
groundwork for the plan that was announced last October. But perhaps I am being too critical
– or am being mislead by the wall of silence? That may indeed be the intention.
There was an NPAS planning meeting held at Ryton-on-Dunsmore police college near Coventry
in mid April. One odd feature of the event was that delegates [or more accurately their
police forces] had to pay fees for their presence. The NPAS thing therefore apparently flags
up nicely as having ‘no budget’ for its ongoing deliberations.
One force has trialled the new ‘central control room’ system already and first reports are
that the move has added ten minutes to the reaction time.
The old system, you may recall, is that most air units monitored the radio traffic of their local
forces – although this may have been 3-4 different channels – and selected the type of call
they believed they might wish to attend with a view to providing best value. In addition to
this officers on the street could request the helicopter directly. Neither version guaranteed
the despatch of a helicopter to a given event but they were pretty instant in response for all
parties. The system was fairly slick and reflected much of the style of instant response
shown by the more successful US and UK operations, reaction times were around 3 minutes
to get airborne plus the transit
times.
The new NPAS system intended to use
the resources of another national organisation,
the British Transport Police
were put up originally but any national
provider will do, thereby adding a layer
of filtering and it is this that adds 10
minutes dead time to the system.
This line of command is not new in
mainland Europe and would not raise
an eyebrow there, but the whole point is
that the UK system as evolved over the
last 20 years was credited with being
among the best and instant access was
at the core of this quality. Many in European
police air support have spoken
highly of the UK system but now it
seems that rather than Europe moving
up to UK standards the UK is dumbing
down.
Regular readers will recall that I deliberately
reduced the PAN reaction time
map to show 10 minute [right] rather
than the 20 minute circles that NPAS
was based upon for map clarity. It
seems that inadvertently I have ended
up showing the likely actual times of
arrival to events under the new scheme.
The gaps are real gaps and effective air
Reducing the circles to ten minutes starts to make the actual
police air support coverage look very flaky