Los Angeles police flights cost $3k an hour, audit finds | Hacker News Reader

Los Angeles police flights cost $3k an hour, audit finds

theguardian.com

14 pointsPaulHoule35 comments

I'm only an amateur aviation geek but this number ($3k / hr) doesn't strike me as excessive. Aircraft in general, and helicopters in particular, are expensive - everything about them is expensive. Fuel, parts, maintenance. For every hour of actual use, you need to spend time training pilots, you need "spare" pilots, who are paid a lot, and also require training... Aircraft spend spare parts faster than cars in routine operation, much more so than cars (which only need parts when something breaks, if you're lucky you could go for years with no major spare parts needed in a car).

Whether they overuse helicopters is a separate matter - no idea.

$3k/hr to catch a kidnapper is not excessive. $3k/hr to go to a chili cook off is excessive.

Police in the US act as if they are royalty. Above the law when the break it, sacrosanct when their budgets are questioned. The one thing I've notice is when they're not around, annoying behavior increases (littering, traffic, etc) but society seems to keep humming along and it doesn't collapse. I'll take the annoyances over their cost and bad behavior any day.

The interesting experiment is could self policing work. As in somebody reports a crime with a cellphone. People of the public collect evidence, evaluate surveillance, catch the culprit, force him via service boycott to face a judgement of his peers and enforce a house arrest.. Could that actually work.. The whole institutional behemoth replaced with apps, databases and transactions.

Vigilante justice has been tried many times. It doesn't work well either.

I dunno, seems like this scenario could easily devolve into some sort of Lord of the Flies mob rule situation.

But there are places in the world where you already have that. And where a citizen formed and normed parallel justice system is largely preferable to none. And the whole surveiled by the public and observed by machine with eternal memory might make the justice less volatile, emotional, add hoc.

How does this compare to other major helicopter fleets? Digging around reddit and some other websites place civilian helicopters at around $1,500-$2,000 per flight hour (not sure if that's including repair and refitting or just fuel), I would imagine with a little government inefficiency thrown in there it wouldn't be too hard to get it up to $3,000 per flight hour.

The biggest issue in the article I found wasn't the actual expense of the flights but rather the wanton use of helicopters for non-essential matters like ferrying officials to meetings to avoid traffic. They quote some figure like 2 helicopters flying 20 hours a day every day, which sounds insane.

Yeah it doesn't seem like police academy fly overs and the like are the best usage of taxpayer dollars. I was thinking about tacking that onto my comment but it felt out of place to the question I was asking originally.

The really crazy part is that one of the factors that make emergency helicopter fleets more expensive than regular commercial chopper fleets is keeping the fleet at a state of readiness. Using them for ferrying officials around cancels those benefits out while driving the costs even higher.

Helicopter rental prices vary tremendously based on the aircraft type, optional equipment, and whether pilots are included. A fully loaded cost of $3K per hour for a police helicopter can be reasonable accounting for depreciation, maintenance, fuel, crew wages, training, licensing, and airport fees. Modern police helicopters tend to be on the expensive with twin turbine engines, large spotlights, stabilized cameras, and high-end digital avionics.

This document has a nice breakdown: https://controller.lacity.gov/landings/lapd-helicopters

It looks like by far the largest cost is staffing. Followed by maintenance, fuel, and financing.

Staffing, maintenance and fuel are directly proportional to flight hours, and the article is complaining about downright corrupt use of flight hours.

The only context I know them in is car chases/suspect spotlighting. If that's the primary use case, I imagine quadcopters eventually take that role for a lot less money.

I thought these mainly existed in LA to wake everyone up every night and make sure everyone knows who is in charge

Exactly. In a decade or two, this fleet will be two helicopters instead of 17, because most of the use cases will be covered by drones.

Fly bys, showing off, and ferrying VIPs over the hoi polloi stuck in traffic will not be done by drones (well, maybe the flybys for the lesser people)

Why is this a decade away? Does 3K/hr not cover a whole team of drones and drone pilots?

Gas powered drones seem vastly superior for almost every use: cheaper, faster, safer, launch and land almost anywhere.

That's no solution. Drones aren't legally allowed to fly in many classes of airspace. The greater Los Angeles area contains a number of areas where larger drones simply can't be used at all.

Just because you can't fly a drone somewhere doesn't mean LAPD can't figure out how to legally fly drones.

Wrong. LAPD is subject to the same rules.

Sure, they need to permitted properly and they can't endanger the local airports. Of course.

At the same time, the FAA drone rules website does lead you to "Are you a Government agency (Federal, State, Tribal, and Territorial law), law enforcement, or a public safety entity?" and the rules LAPD would follow to operate a large drone are not the same as a random enthusiast would follow to operate a small drone. If the hypothetical drone is over 55 lbs, they might be operating just under the heading "Public Aircraft Operations—Manned and Unmanned".

https://www.faa.gov/regulations_policies/advisory_circulars/...

And even if that weren't true, law enforcement is a government operation and it's very plausible to see them get permitted to do things an average corporation or individual isn't. For example, extra requirements for flying near airports that require specific capabilities and sensors in the drone and a special pilot license.

The primary use case is, according to the article, looting the public treasury for prestige and ease.

I saw a bill for a 5 mile ambulance ride last month. $4K. A Careflight was $20K.

LAPD helicopters for everyone, they're cheap.

I had to pay $800 for an ambulance my son never actually rode, that someone else called. They administered a band-aide to his forehead.

Having watched a lot of bodycam videos of LAPD officers requesting air backup and it being overhead only minutes later, I think there could be reasonable justification for these expenses. Even if used for other purposes like transportation most of the time, the availability if needed is worth something.

For what though? If you or I requested a helicopter and it was here three minutes later is that money well spent? What is a helicopter doing for us? What is it doing for them that we think this is worth it.

Finding suspects for crimes in progress.

OK? I mean the article itself says the majority of flight time is not used for responding to high profile crime, according the PD's own self evaluation. So what are we getting out of this?

A drone should be more efficient and cheaper way of achieving same goal

They really should just be using drones here. They can probably do it for much less money, maybe one center in the country could handle remote piloting needs for most of the cities that need this. The helicopters are just used for crimes/get aways in progress anyways.

That is very naive and ignores the reality of current FAA regulations. Larger, more capable drones are prohibited from flying in much of greater Los Angeles area airspace.

Regulations can and will eventually change. A lot of air force pilots are being trained up drones, it isn’t unprecedented that they would put their skills to work in the civilian sector later.

There is actually an industry wide pilot shortage. But that's not even the main obstacle. The real problem is that large drones are unable to reliably see and avoid VFR traffic. Technology isn't going to fix that any time soon, and the FAA rules which restrict large civilian drones to certain defined airspace aren't going to change. The real value of a human piloted helicopter for police work is that it can go pretty much everywhere.

https://skybrary.aero/articles/see-and-avoid

We will see law enforcement using more small, lightweight drones that are subject to much looser FAA rules. Those are useful for short range searches but can't follow a car chase or scan a large area.

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