National Police Air Service
Police aviation service providing air support in England and Wales
The National Police Air Service (NPAS) is a police aviation service that provides centralised air support to the 43
territorial police forces in England and Wales, as well as the three special police forces serving that area. It replaced the previous structure whereby police forces operated their own helicopters, either individually or in small consortia (such as the South East Air Support Unit). The project was coordinated by Alex Marshall (the then Chief Constable of Hampshire Police). West Yorkshire Police is the lead force, and the service is coordinated from the NPAS Operations Centre, at Wakefield, West Yorkshire.
The future of NPAS was in some doubt previously. In June 2021 the Mayor of West Yorkshire, Tracy Brabin, gave formal notice to end West Yorkshire Police's responsibilities as the leading force for NPAS. At a meeting of the National Strategic Board found the levels of availability for the fleet were suboptimal and that police forces which fund NPAS were seeing financial challenges.
The work of NPAS will be incorporated into the planned National Police Service as part of the forthcoming reforms to policing in England and Wales.
History
Rollout
NPAS became operational on 1 October 2012, and was rolled out across England and Wales in stages. The service provides 19 helicopters and four fixed-wing aircraft, operating from bases across England and Wales.
NPAS suggested that the Police Scotland Air Support Unit join the service to reduce costs.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “National Police Air Service” is police aviation service providing air support in England and Wales. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through National, Police and Service, not as a finished interpretation.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6974956. None of the 2 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2021 and 2012.
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This entry incorporates text from “National Police Air Service” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.