The UK's National Police Air Service (NPAS) is set to take delivery of four Vulcanair P68Rs later this year in order to offer a fixed wing service for the first time. A collaboration of the previous police air support units which were operated by individual regional police forces, NPAS com-menced in 2012 providing a service to the south east and by September last year all 44 forces had signed up.

“The service delivered support to over 28,000 tasks last year, flying in excess of 20,000 hours with its fleet of 19 EC135s and 145s,” says director of operations Ollie Dismore.

“Bringing everything under one banner has avoided duplicating the service, because each legacy air support unit had its own structure. We have also brought 25 to 30 maintenance contracts into two and that will shortly reduce to one as our MD Explorers are sold off. All this improves the scale economies which have seen our costs fall over the past four and a half years.”

Ground has been broken on a new facility at Doncaster, which will serve as the NPAS fixed-wing hub and will provide base maintenance for the P68Rs.

“Hour-for-hour the fixed wing aircraft we have chosen is cheaper to operate than our helicopters but the jury is out on whether we will see a corresponding reduction in rotary wing use,” Dismore continues. “Initially it was looked at from a cost saving point of view but there are a number of tasks like football matches, party conferences and ongoing searches where you want enduring assets and these aircraft will have at least five hours endurance. So, with their introduction, we will be able to send the right machine for the task. The P68s will not be suitable everywhere; we won't be operating them over central London because of airspace issues but elsewhere in the country, or over London at night, they can go and complete pre-planned tasks including assisting human trafficking and child sexual exploitation investigations.