Just to balance the facts here, this is not standard practice all over the country and you MUST consider the capabilities of the aircraft.
First, if you do not own an aircraft, it can cost up to £700 an hour to borrow one from a neighbouring force. Before you start saying why are they not universally available, why should one force pay a fortune each year if the other force is too tight to spend any money. (it may not be true in this case, just highlighting a point)
We get at least 2 and up to 10 requests a day for missing person searches and we fly for most of them. The unit is budgeted for approx 3 hours flying a day on average. If you search properly, it takes hours to look in nooks and crannys for heat sources. Just going out and searching scotland would not work. You need a defined (small) search area for each sortie.
So more information is needed here before you hang the management out to dry, was the request to search a specific area or was it a request to search Scotland!! It is not unusual for us to get a request to search for a blue Mondeo in Liverpool!!
Remember, Air Support Units actually love to go flying, but we operate on an extremely tight budget. If you want to give us a bucket of cash.... Great!! But we all know that will not happen, so we make do with what we get and management continue to make impossible decisions
