Performance dashboard 2023/24
Flying hours per region
In 2023/24, our aircraft flew a total of 11,619 hours on behalf of police forces.
This is 442 more hours than in 2022/23.
A further 1,373 hours were flown for training, transit and maintenance purposes.
An aircraft is deemed available when all its mission systems and crew are ready and able to be deployed.
In 2023/24, the average aircraft availability rate was 71.4% - which is slightly higher than in 2022/23, when the rate was 70.4%.
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 (12%) and pilot issues (6.8%) were the main reasons for unavailability.
Of 36,487 calls for service, 35.7% were cancelled and, of these, 78.4% were 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. 43.0% of all cancellations were for this reason.
Our aircraft were deployed 19,690 times. This compares to 18,566 deployments the previous year. Of all deployments in 2023/24, 29.2% were made in-flight.
Outcome of deployments
Of all the incidents attended by an NPAS crew in 2023/24, 90.3% resulted in a positive outcome.
This equates to 1,050 missing or vulnerable people found, and 2,881 suspects apprehended, as a direct result of air support.
Our skilled team of despatchers, based in our dedicated Operations Centre at West Yorkshire Police headquarters, assesses each call for the appropriate response.
In 2023/24, our aircraft crews attended 3,084 priority one incidents. These are when there is an immediate threat to a life, a crime is in progress or there is a nationally significant event or terrorism incident.
The average time to reach a scene from receiving a call was 12 minutes and two seconds. This is slightly faster than the previous year’s response rate of 12 minutes and 18 seconds.
A further 10,767 priority two incidents were attended, with the average time to reach the scene being 20 minutes. Again, this is an improvement on the response rate of 21 minutes and 54 seconds recorded in 2022/23 and meets the Service Level Agreements made with police forces.
Taskings
Of all air support tasks in 2023/24, 85% involved searching for a suspect, vehicle or vulnerable person.
There were 737 pre-planned tasks supported by NPAS. The majority of these were requests for aerial images.
NPAS has an important role to play in the management of large public events too.
Most notably, this includes high profile annual sporting fixtures, such as the Grand National at Aintree, large community gatherings and demonstrations, and planned policing operations.
Declined calls for service
There will always be times when, unavoidably, we have to decline a call for our assistance. The main reasons are unsafe weather conditions for flying, engineering requirements for the aircraft, crew abstractions for training or pilot flight time limitations.
On occasions a request simply isn’t viable for air support.
Our experienced officers provide tactical advice to Force Incident Managers and Control Room staff, advising them of the capabilities of air support in any particular scenario, taking into consideration timings, the environment, the capabilities of the aircraft and weather limitations.
In 2023/24, we declined 18% of calls for servic