IF YOU'RE ever unlucky enough to have the police's crime-fighting helicopter on your tail, give up.
Criminals hiding in bins and garden sheds, running through fields and swimming across rivers – stop now.
NPAS Redhill have caught you on camera, and officers on the ground are being directed to you.
Based at Redhill Aerodrome, the team of seven Tactical Flight Officers and four pilots are ready for any situation.
The aircraft can stay in the air for one and three quarter hours and can reach 98 per cent of the population in the South East within 20 minutes.
Missing people, suicide attempts and high-speed car chases are just some of the tasks they deal with from 1,500 feet up.
Speaking to the Mirror, TFO Simon Hatch said: "If you imagine trying to search this airfield on foot in the dark, how many officers you'd need and how long it would take, we can clear it in a matter of minutes.
"Criminals are not going to get away from us. They can do what they want, swim across rivers, we have two jet engines above us, we know where they're going and we can direct ground units in."
NPAS ( National Police Air Service) was set up in 2012 as a cost-saving solution to each police force having its own helicopter.
Now West Yorkshire have taken over as the lead force, and the fleet of 26 aircraft at 23 bases around the country are managed by one control room.
Before October 1, 2012, the Redhill base didn't exist. "We didn't have running water when we moved in," Mr Hatch said.
Now the hangar has an Ops room, kitchen, toilets, TV room, gym area and even a ping pong table, shared with the air ambulance crew next door.
A crew is dispatched when a police force requests air support.
"We like to get called early," Mr Hatch said. "The longer we leave it, the bigger our search area."
Each helicopter is crewed with a pilot and TFO 1, who sits in front controlling the camera and TFO 2, sitting in the back listening to the police radios and navigating.
A state-of-the-art 360 degree camera under the helicopter's nose can zoom in close enough to read number plates, while its night vision capabilities mean it can find people in the dark.
"We had somebody recently who tried to hide from us in a bin and the heat from their body had transferred to the plastic and you could see it glow," Mr Hatch said.
"We save a lot of man hours on the ground. We can see things officers can't. That means those officers can be redirected elsewhere, they can do house-to-house enquiries, hospitals, patrol the streets. We occasionally get complaints about noise. Obviously people will have a natural curiosity but we'll only be there for as long as we need to be there. When we're deployed, it'll only be as serious as blue lights on the ground."
NPAS Redhill occasionally needs to ask air traffic at Gatwick and Heathrow to be held or diverted while they work close to the airports.
Mr Hatch said it takes a lot of courage, and the right information, to cause disruption to a major international airport.
"You train hard for those situations so that you get it right," he added.
There is certainly no such thing as a typical day for NPAS Redhill.
"Sometimes we do continuous cover, we're eating while refuelling," Mr Hatch said.
And while there are quiet days, the crew carries out office duties including aircraft maintenance, writing up evidence, pre-planning tasks or speaking to the public. Or sometimes: "It's just Strictly Come Dancing on a Saturday night on the kitchen TV."
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