Those more well informed could you see something like this happening?
While I'm sure that none of us in Air Support around 2005-2010(when the idea of a National setup was bring planned) could have nailed down the specifics of the current problems with NPAS, we were all pretty sure that it wouldn't work. This was reinforced when we were part of the NWAOG(North West Air Operations Group, the initial NPAS implementation) which included North Wales, Cheshire, Merseyside, GMP and Lancs. At the time, their Air Support budgets were around 0.5% of their total Force budget, which seemed pretty good value for what we used to achieve.
Would one of these been a better choice for Fixed Wing aircraft?
Much better.
Yes a quad copter in the back of a patrol car is a 'good' thing
I have to say that having seen a few programmes on the TV, I'm impressed with their camera performance, especially the thermal, which seems to work immediately when ours used to take 5 minutes or so to cool down.