Police heli's operating costs?
 

Hello wanted to know if any rotorheads could help me out.

I work with offenders and part of this work is around how much offences cost the community. Had an event recently in which the police helicopter was used and just trying to work out how much that would have cost.

Does anyone want to take a stab at how much the police helicopter operating costs are?

Bit of a long shot but if anyone can help would be much appreciated!

KBaB
:)

Depends what you mean by cost. Is it the marginal cost of that extra hour of flying or whatever? Do you want to include all the salaries of those people who supervise Air Support, paint the hangar .... ?

You can get pretty much get whatever cost you like, depending where you choose to draw your boundaries.

Alternatively, the sort of hourly rate for say an EC135 if you were to hire it would be roughly around £1,000................., which should be good enough for your purposes, I suspect.

Mind you, the way that air support works is that there is an annual budget for flying hours - this tends to mean that if the flying time was not spent on one job, it would be spent on something else.

thanks Helinut £1k is about what I was thinking but just wanted to check.
The costs I was looking at was the hourly running rate of the heli and the staff costs. I seem to think 3 staff on a police heli? (pilot, front and rear spotter?)

But just knowing the rough cost is a great start, cheers!

The full economic cost including all salaries etc could be more in the region of £1500 to £2000 per hour.

DOCs are less than half the £1000 depending on the usual factors. The staff are paid whether they fly or not as is insurance etc, so if you're costing 30 minutes versus 45 minutes on a task then the DOC figure is the relevant one.

Which is pretty much what I was saying - it depends what you choose to include...........

As far as the direct salary costs goes, that too will vary enormously. The different ASUs fly such different amounts that when you share out things like salaries over the flying time in a shift you get very different "costs". The "light use" units might average around 1 hour per shift - the busiest could fly 3-4.

Anything from nothing to £2-3K per flying hour

... And then you might want to consider the old arguement about whether to DEDUCT what it might have cost if the helicopter had not been available to conduct the search ( or whatever ) - with lots of Police Officers on the ground over a longer period of time to get the same job done .

In which case there could be a SAVING of the Police costs.

http://i34.photobucket.com/albums/d1.../Coconutty.jpg

You could always ring your local ASU, they should be able to tell you.

See above posts. :rolleyes:

Our Force charges out at £1500 per hour, if that's any help. Obviously, as mentioned, DOCs aren't that much but if we're wanted by another county, we're taking the asset away from our own.
I know another that charges at £2k per hour.:)