New [police] helicopter needed

[rotorcraig]

BBC News story New helicopter needed

Staffordshire Police may have to replace their helicopter three years earlier than planned.
The aircraft, which is shared with West Mercia police, is not due to be replaced until 2008.

However police say the current helicopter will not comply with new instrumentation rules which come into force in 2005.

Chief constable John Giffard says the Home Office could pay half of the £3.2m total cost of the helicopter, meaning each force having to find about £550,000.

Anyone know of these "new instrumentation rules"?

RC

[PANews]

At the moment it appears that this is a case of a too heavy precis of a Chief Constables briefing report to the police authority meeting next Monday.

There are no 'new rules' that will cause a premature demise of the early EC135T1s. The police are just looking at the possibilities of going SPIFR before the intended date of 2008.

What seems to have happened is that the article 'imported' the 31/12/2004 implementation of JarOps 3 which will require Heading and Alt. hold on the aircraft.

It is not in the police report and anyway no decision has been made about whether Grandfather rights will apply to these airframes.

[Helinut]

There is almost inevitable pressure from the CAA for all public transport night flying to be pushed more and more in the direction of FULL IFR.

For "proper" Commercial Air Transport (i.e. carrying fare paying pax) the CAA have piled on additional requirements for UK ops - twin engine, autopilot (with heading and alt modes), significant extra restrictions for operations that are not full IFR etc. These have largely been as a result of knee-jerk reactions in response to a few notable accidents. Whether or not the new requirements would have made any difference to those accidents is a moot point - basically the CAA seem to use any significant accident as a reason for adding higher standards (or at least more regulations). There rarely seems to be regard to the cost of such requirements.

The police ops carried out under PAOCs in accordance with PAOMs have often not had to comply wth quite the same standards - basically they seem to lag behind the "proper" public transport case. I don't believe that the CAA have yet quite insisted upon autopilots for police night flying - but the next round of "improvements" is certainly moving in that general direction.

Ultimately, there is a move afoot to require police ops to comply with a modified JAR-OPS 3 standard - if/when this happens it may well be that autopilots will be required. In the mean time, it may be "economically sensible" or at least a good excuse to get new toys to look ahead .................

I wonder what the other ASUs who don't have autopilots on their helicopters are going to do??

[Droopy]

To the best of my knowledge, only North Midlands [Derbyshire/Notts] have no autopilot at all and they have a SPIFR EC135 in the pipeline. Everyone else has stabilisation, whether the AS355 autopilot, the SAS on the EC135 CDS or the full system of the EC135 CPDS, MD902 or the lone BK117.

I've done both unstabilised and full autopilot work on v. dark nights and I know which is by far the safest when things start going wrong with other bits of the aircraft.......

[PANews]

The reason that this story [gently] rocked the foundations was because it was thought that someone had 'spooked' the Staffordshire Cheif Constable.

Now the dust has settled a bit I guess that it will be business as usual.

As a result of my enquiries into this it is my understanding that the early 135 SAS would not fit in with the JAR Ops 3 requirement its all about 'CAA acceptable' autopilots not SAS.

Thats assuming that anything happens at all. Most opinions seem to doubt it.

[Thomas coupling]

The 7 classics (135 CDS) that don't have full auto pilot will have major problems, financially and technically, retro fitting a SPIFR suite. We are already 'suffering' as a result of the CAA not accepting french standards for a basic SAS system, where we cannot fly if c/b is below 1000'.
I would surmise that 'grandfather rights' be afforded to these a/c with an end date well into the future, similar to the Bolkow 105 problems.
Assuming the average police helo lasts 10 years, and that these new generation helos have been running since early 1999, we are already half way through! I would hope the CAA recognise this and specify full SPIFR for the next batch of helos.

:ugh: