I have not been on here for a while mainly as I retired from the Police and the great job on Air Support and my new "life" means I am pretty busy doing other "serving the folk stuff"! Anyway in my new role I have had the chance to speak to the odd PCC now and then.
Yesterday wAs a chance to ask a PCC who is on the NPAS team what he knew about the Met, he told me they ARE NOT joining and NPAS is a bit of a mess, they are £1 million overspent and need sorting out..... Thats a shock
West Yorks are not giving up the host force job but it looks like that (as I was told) "flying to burn off hours" has to stop, in fact reining in hours is what I seemed to be getting from him. He also said he thought that NPAS / Police should use Drones for photographic work rather than helicopters....I pointed out that a Drone may well be useful in some minor circumstances of static low level photography but they will never replace a crew and helicopter for most roles, such as pursuits and offender or misper searches, I could see limited use of Drones for police work.
I get the feeling that NPAS is in for a shake up I hope it is the management who have failed the service and public very badly rather than helicopters and their crews. I explained that regionalisation in small groups sharing resources ie using the Midlands as an example where four units worked together to share resources and tasking worked extremely well and that model would be a better alternative better adopted across the UK.