Whitehead06 - From the perspective of the guys on the ground. Absolutely Yes!
When they were drawing up and selecting NPAS base locations they decided through consultation with Police forces that the helicopters should be no more than a 20 minute response time away from any area in their primary deployment zone in order to both get the resource to scene within and appropriate time frame and provide sufficient 'on task' time.
From the Police perspective the 20 minute response time starts from the moment that the officer on the ground says "we need air support please!"
However NPAS said "whats the top speed of the helicopter?"
"So how far can it cover at top speed in 20 minutes?"
Then drew a big circle with that distance as its radius around the potential bases to determine where to place the helicopters.
However, their method assumed that the helicopter was already hovering over the base and able to accerate to top speed instantly and also go in a straight line without slowing down or diverting course for anything (like Class A airspace for exampe). They were forgetting, of course, the time for the message to get to the crew, the crew to work out location/routing to the task, head out to the heli, startup, run checklists, hovertaxi as required, lift and transition into forwards flight and accelerate to maximum permissible speed for that routing.
Thus the areas of responsibility are stupidly big in some cases.
Thankfully for my force the basing calculations worked out that we kept our helicopter at the same site and our neighbouring force kept theirs at the same location too because of the call volumes that each handle (ours was already providing air support for 3 forces and the other fr 2 forces) so our primary and backup air support is still coming from the same locations but many others (particularly in more remote areas) are suffering from lack of air support due to the distancea that each now has to cover.
Last edited by Burnie5204; 8th Dec 2013 at 12:45.