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Comment by sickofparadox | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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