As you will know I have another Internet based location where I can pontificate and let my personal opinions be known, month in month out. But Rotorheads is somewhere special of course!
It just feels at times I rattle on about NPAS far too much (some/many will agree), after all its just one operation across a pretty big world market - and many other operations have their faults that can be highlighted. I hope some of that appears at times too! Its easy to play the grumpy old git at times.
The management of NPAS - and that includes the NPCC (police chiefs council) who seem to be more the problem rather than the answer - just come across as clueless.
Old airframes are not news, there are plenty out there, it is what expected of them that is the problem. You can mitigate the problem by not expecting each airframe to fly as many hours as they used to (1,000 pa) and by having a PBH arrangement in place to mitigate the worn out equipment but NPAS management "saved money" by getting rid of PBH. Well of course they didn't they just made the fleet hangar queens waiting at Oxford for spares while at the back of the urgency queue. POLU was never going to be brought back [it was just too different from the rest of the fleet by the time the Norwegians finished with it] but needs must. It must be like a colander with all those drill holes. The same applies to EMID which is also different but not quite as different (a combination of a Macpod, PWC engines and different equipment fit). So they sit in as training ships to reduce the pressure on the operational fleet. Should we ignore the fact that the pre-NPAS fleet has been decimated numerically?
The big disappointment is the fixed wing. Put simply it was a nice little training aircraft that was expected to act up in a role that was a step too far for it. Nothing new there. You will recall that UK police started off with little helicopters that outgrew their role equipment. The Squirrel's [AS350/355] did the job admirably but the role fit got heavier and heavier until their sortie times were down to 20 minutes and they needed to move up to the EC135 to get a reasonable endurance. Both the 355 and 135 have space and seats to spare but its the kit that is the leveller. The P68 suffers from the same problems. Spare seats but they dare not fill them. A lack of f/w pilots just makes the situation worse.
At the moment there are projects out there to get new airframes into the fleet, nothing special just some 'same again' H135s (or perhaps the Bell 429) hopefully with the PBH back in place! But, this process has now been limping along for three years without any outcome. The last purchase of multiple airframes (the Met EC145s) took just two years to get them selected and in service.
I have no doubt that the front line crews and pilots will make NPAS work after a fashion but there is an awful lot of drag built into the system - mainly caused by people in charge that do not know the subject.
And now we have the Chancellor of the Exchequer foretelling the arrival of automatic drones... Five years he says. We have been saying ten years for the past 20 years... and that maybe way too soon to pension off all you helicopter pilots. Maybe not in my lifetime is more accurate.
My apologies for the same sort of rant - albeit on a different venue!