Lothian and Borders Police

[Heliport]

Report in today's Glasgow Sunday Mail



RORY COPS'AIR SEARCH DELAY
Chiefs refused to let chopper join hunt

POLICE chiefs have been criticised for delaying an air search in the hours after tragic schoolboy Rory Blackhall went missing.

Senior officers refused three separate requests for a helicopter with heat-seeking equipment to join the hunt.

The decision left detectives engaged in the search "baffled".
Eleven-year-old Rory's body was found hidden under a tarpaulin in woodland three days after he vanished last August.

An independent report into how Lothian and Borders Police investigated his disappearance then death has highlighted the refusal to call in the helicopter and has advised the force to review their procedures.

A source said: "This was the largest missing person search in Scotland in recent years and all the stops should have been pulled out to find Rory as quickly as possible."


Seems odd on the face of it.
Anyone know any more?


H.

[PPRuNe Radar]

Lothian & Borders don't have their own ASU, it would have been Strathclydes which could have been used.

Still hard to fathom out the decision though, since the Strathclyde ASU chopper is presumably available to other forces ??

[Letsby Avenue]

Quite right... It would have been the Strathclyde machine but like everything else nowadays; flying time has to be paid for - If Lothian don't want to pay they don't get to play:} A sad reflection on the state of policing today. The incompetent senior officer who initially turned down the offer of a helicopter with state of the art search equipment on board should face the consequences of his actions - but he won't...:hmm:

http://www.sundaymail.co.uk/news/tm_objectid=16640148%26method=full%26siteid=64736%26headline =exclusive%2d%2drory%2dcops%2dair%2dsearch%2ddelay-name_page.html

[Islandcrazy]

Lets have a look at the facts.....

1. This is from a newspaper article...so no problem there then must be true

2. The cost of air-support is sometimes given free of charge between police forces..... so it may have been free anyway?

3. The cost of paying for air-support can be dramatically less than using on the ground resources which are scarce/expensive and take a long time to search an area

4. Missing persons are always taken very seriously especially children and the 'senior' officers are normally falling over themselves to make sure everything is done properly

4. Perhaps there may be other circumstances here.....maybe?

5. Anyone from bonny Scotland that know more facts?

IC

[jayteeto]

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 :(

[Fortyodd2]

Letsby,
It would appear, from the Newspaper article, that the initial request was turned down because there were "too many people around to make Thermal Imaging effective". That is actually in accordance with our own tasking criteria and I doubt that we would have attended under similar circumstances. The refusal of the subsequent request in the early hours does not make sense at all though.
If Lothian & Borders Police consider Air Support expensive, however, they may be about to find out just how expensive it can be not having it.

[aeromys]

Still far too early to second guess the investigation, as there are various reasons the Air Ops Unit didn't attend, despite the obvious one of cross charging. Weather at the Air Ops base, or at the scene, or en-route? Level of concern assigned to the task at the early stages? Etc etc. And at the end of the day, and with my utmost respects to the family, if the sad deed had already been comitted, there's no guarantee the Thermal Imaging would have picked up a dwindling heat source under a tarpaulin which was also under tree cover. TI is good, but it's not undefeatable.
Looking at the map
http://www.streetmap.co.uk/streetmap.dll?G2M?X=303196&Y=669364&A=Y&Z=3
there were certainly areas near to the school worth searching, whatever the time of day. Although the request to search in the early hours may have been outside the Air Ops normal working hours, requiring a call out, more expense, messed up pilot's hours etc. which (wrongly or not) may have influenced the senior officer's decision.
Still only one Police Air Ops unit covering the whole of Scotland though? Do the rely on millitary SAR up in the hills?