Our 2024/25 performance dashboard: Deployments

Deployments

In 2024/25, our aircraft flew a total of 11,245 hours on behalf of police forces. This is 374 more hours than in 2023/24.

A further 1,456 hours were flown for training, transit and maintenance purposes. Our aircraft were deployed 20,193 times. This compares to 19,690 deployments in the previous year. Of all deployments in 2024/25, 33.1% were made whilst aircraft were in flight.

An aircraft is deemed available when all its mission systems and crew are ready and able to be deployed, subject to weather limitations.

In 2024/25, the average aircraft availability rate was 65.8% - which is lower than in 2023/24, when the rate was 71.4%.

It is important to note that annual maintenance requirements of around 10 weeks per aircraft, per year, make it impossible to achieve 100% availability.

Engineering (15.1%) and pilot issues (7.3%) were the main reasons for unavailability.

Of 39,624 calls for service, 36% were cancelled and, of these, 77.5% were cancelled before an aircraft lifted.

When an NPAS crew is cancelled    it is often because a person or vehicle has been found prior to our arrival.

40.8% of all cancellations were for this reason.

In 2024/25, more of our deployments were made whilst an aircraft was already airborne, compared to the previous year.

This was especially the case for our fixed wing crews, which have the endurance to remain airborne for up to eight hours and are deployed on targeted patrols.

Not surprisingly, London and the North West region, with high demands for air support, recorded the highest percentage of tasks which were deployed whilst an aircraft was already
in flight.