Air Support Division
The LAPD maintains the second largest non-military airforce in the world. It maintains 21 helicopters and 1 fixed-wing aircraft. The helicopters are painted silver and blue. The LAPD Air Support Division is slowly trading in their older Eurocopters for newer Eurocopter models. The new models, however, are entering service with the more traditional black-and-white paint schemes we are used to seeing on most police department patrol cars. The letters LAPD appear on the top side of the aircraft in blue, capital letters. Typical air units include 14 Eurocopter AS-350B2 AStars, 4 Bell 206B-IIIs and 1 Bell UH-1 (no longer in service, due to maintenance issues). The aircraft come with a wide variety of electronics and equipment that include a 30 million candlepower "Nightsun" spotlight, optical FLIR cameras and electronically stabilized binoculars, a LoJack signal receiver, police radios in addition to the built-in aviation radios.
Two officers with at least three years of patrol car service fly in each air unit; they are armed and able to land and make arrests in areas not accessible by other means. They depart from the Hooper Heliport in downtown Los Angeles, and the Van Nuys airport.
Air units are considered crucial to officer safety, providing valuable information with regards to barricaded suspects, suspects fleeing on foot or in a vehicle, violent incidents involving large numbers of individuals, and then some. Air units are automatically requested when initiating a traffic stop on a "code 37" vehicle, or suspect with known wants or warrants that are a felony in order to limit the potential for a vehicle pursuit.
Air units do not fly during poor weather (particularly dense fog) due to aviation safety.
Read more about this topic: Los Angeles Police Department Resources, Mobility
Famous quotes containing the words air, support and/or division:
“The air of one’s native country is the most healthy air.”
—Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904)
“Every winter the liquid and trembling surface of the pond, which was so sensitive to every breath, and reflected every light and shadow, becomes solid to the depth of a foot or a foot and a half, so that it will support the heaviest teams, and perchance the snow covers it to an equal depth, and it is not to be distinguished from any level field. Like the marmots in the surrounding hills, it closes its eyelids and becomes dormant for three months or more.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“O, if you raise this house against this house
It will the woefullest division prove
That ever fell upon this cursed earth.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)