Florida Police Aviation Unit found lacking...

MightyGem · August 11, 2003

A rather damning report of the Tampa unit click here

Heloplt · September 4, 2003

I could post a thousand page essay that might give you the correct other side of this story, but lets just say that the news media is in business to sell papers, or get viewers. They usually have a slant and posting the other side of a story does not always sell papers or bring in the viewers. Does the 'retired' TPD pilot sound like a disgruntled ex-employee??? I'll let you make the call. Is the 'consultant' completely unbiased or does he have an ax to grind with the agency?? I'll let you guess. My statistics teacher told me the first day of class that one can make statistics work in whatever way one wants to. An agency can train realistically and risk training incidents or it can sit back and prepare funerals for its flight crews in the event of an actual emergency while performing a mission. I think if one checks the Tampa Police training that the crewmembers get much more training than the industry norm...

I also think that if one were to check (ALEA would be a good start) that the Tampa Police requirements are equal to or greater than most other law enforcement agencies across the nation. The lowest time pilot employed by the agency has over 1600 helicopter flight hours and 4 of the 6 pilots have over 3000 helicopter flight hours.

Sorry for the tirade, I promised I'd keep it short; but it is hard sometimes to sit back while getting trashed by the media when the truth is sometimes not at the forefront...

Heli-Ops · September 9, 2003

Mighty Gem - I have been and visited the Tampa guys on and off over the years and in my opinion, they run a great operation. They were one of the units to embrace new technology and their 407s have all the bells and whistles, obviously not as many as the EC135s and 902s that you have there in the UK, but still a lot for the US.

As the other post said, their standards were, from what I remember, above the standard mins and their pilots are very competent. I understand there are a couple of disgruntled ex-employess out there, and they would no doubt have been some of the people the newspaper spoke to.

Regards

Heli Ops :devil:

Flying Pig · September 9, 2003

The article is full of mis-statements. Like "250 hours is far less than what is required to be a commercial helicopter pilot"

Unfortunately, Police Depts will never be in a position where they can hire from a pool of qualified police officers with 1500 + hours in helicopters.

HeliMark · September 9, 2003

Here is my question to anyone.

What is the difference in a 250 hr pilot teaching or doing tours/photo flights and a 250 hr police pilot. Should we ground all of them for not having 1000+ hours?

Almost all of the police pilots get training well and above any that most civilians get. Along with continuing re-training. Most police pilots after training still has an instructor onboard until they get in the 400-500 hour mark.

This is not meant to seperate police/civilian pilots out. There are great pilots in both sectors. And bad ones in both also.