Police helicopters back up officers on the ground

Jace Radke

Friday, Feb. 18, 2000 | 11:05 a.m.

Every day the calls come in to Metro Police dispatch from officers asking the same question: "Can we get the air unit out here?"

It has become second nature for ground-bound police to call on the 11 pilots and millions of dollars in technology that makes up the department's air force.

"The air unit provides a visual platform for us, and easily replaces 10 squad car ground units," Sheriff Jerry Keller said. "It gives us a quick response that we need with a county that is a little bit bigger than the state of New Jersey.

"It's been an added resource that has given us a necessary operational advantage."

Flying above the nearly 8,000 square miles of Clark County, the unit uses five helicopters and an array of high-technology gadgets to help ground units whether they are conducting a rescue off a mountain ledge, speeding a specialized unit to a crime scene or tracking a high-speed car chase.

The air unit responds to about 8,000 calls for service every year and that number continues to rise. And at night those calls can come constantly, unit Sgt. Richard Servoss said.

"One of the hardest parts about being in this unit is prioritizing the calls when you're up there," Servoss said. "We just go to the most important first and then it's usually call-to-call.

"We always fly in pairs with one pilot who is in communication with the tower, and a second pilot who serves as a lookout and is in contact with dispatch and the ground units."

In a pursuit situation the pilot is only concerned with keeping a bead on the car or suspect that he is following while the lookout reports on the chase so that patrol cars can follow from a safe distance, unit supervisor Lt. Dwight Mahan said.

When talking about the helicopters Mahan usually starts off with what he calls the "truck," a Bell HH-1H "Huey" rescue helicopter that can reach speeds of 134 mph.

"It's basically a big, fast truck," Mahan said. "We've used it to fly the SWAT team and bomb squad to out-of-the-way places like Pahrump and Laughlin.

"On New Year's Eve we had a dead body out in Gold Butte, about 80 miles northeast of Las Vegas. We were short-handed that night and didn't want to spare the resources to drive the detectives and coroner out there, so we flew them out."

The "Huey" was designed with rescues in mind, seating nine including the flight crew and having a 300-mile range. It can deploy a 250-foot-long steel cable hoist for rescues as it did during July's flooding when Sgt. Mike Petricka was lowered to the hood of a car caught in floodwaters at Boulder Highway to pluck a driver to safety.

Mahan said the helicopter "probably already has over a hundred rescues under its belt, using the hoist about seven or eight times.

The rescue helicopter is one of two Bell models that the department acquired from the Air Force, which had the choppers in mothballs, Mahan said. The second of the two is expected to be up and working in the next several months.

"Our other four are the ones everyone sees over their neighborhoods," Mahan said. "For basically 20 hours a day they are up patrolling and taking calls."

Those helicopters are all smaller McDonnell Douglas 500 series helicopters, with a distinct bubble-like cockpit.

The patrol helicopters are rotated for maintenance with at least two always ready to fly.

Two of the choppers are specially equipped with FLIR (forward looking infra-red) night vision systems and night/sun lighting systems. Cameras that can download images to ground-based command centers are also part of the high-tech gear used by the unit.

All that technology comes with a price tag that the department currently budgets about $3.6 million a year for, including salaries, services, supplies and benefits for the air unit and search and rescue. And when the department gets a new helicopter like it did about 13 months ago, the price increases dramatically.

"A brand new one runs around $1 million," Mahan said. "The actual cost of running the helicopters varies. We break it down to about $200 an hour per helicopter.

"These machines have a long list of items and components that all have to be replaced at certain times. It's not like a car where you wait for it to break and then fix it. You replace the part when it's time, or you'll end up replacing the whole helicopter."

Servoss, who has been with the air unit for over 20 years and was awarded Metro's Medal of Valor for piloting a 1997 rescue on Mount Potosi, dates the start of the air unit back to the then-Las Vegas Police Department's purchase of a helicopter in 1969 under Chief N.D. "Pete" Witcher.

"We got a second one in 1971 and then we continued to grow when the police department merged with the (Clark County) Sheriff's Department in 1973," Servoss said. "That's when we got involved in the search and rescue business."

Rescuing people out of the Spring Mountains and flooding creek beds is a big part of the unit's job, but patrol is just as large if not a larger priority, Mahan said.

"Just about every call we get on the ground we can get in the air," Mahan said. "We find about 120 stolen cars a year in the desert areas skirting town. We've actually flown over a ditch and found people stripping cars."

The helicopter crews also routinely respond to robberies, burglaries, searches and fights.

"One of the things the helicopters are very effective at is dispersing fights," Mahan said. "You see the big fights in the stands at a football game involving a large group of people, but once the helicopter comes flying over they all scatter. It saves us sending 50 officers over to break it up."

A less glamorous request made of the helicopters is flying city and county officials over proposed construction sites for aerial photos and ferrying technicians to Metro's communications towers that ring the mountains.

"Sometimes the technicians have had to sit out on a mountain for quite a while when we get busy, and when a city official is up with us they just have to ride along when we get a chase or another call," Mahan said.

Since many of the calls are the same as a ground unit would take care of, the department follows one strict rule when looking for pilots.

"It doesn't do any good to put the best pilot in the world up there if they haven't been an officer on the street," Mahan said. "They need to have been on the street and know what the officers are going through down there so that they can get them the information they need."

An officer has to be with the department for about four years and must have a private pilot's license before applying for the air unit.

"They have to get that license on their own, and once they have it we'll train them how to fly the helicopters," Mahan said. "After that they'll continue to train. We have emergency air procedure training for all our pilots every 120 days, and then they have to also complete all the regular training and checks that police officers have to meet."

The unit needs one more pilot to reach its full allotment of 12, and Keller says he expects the unit to continue to grow.

"It's something that has to grow as the area does," Keller said. "It's a unit we plan for well in advance of the need because you can't take officers right out of a car and put them in the helicopter.

"We're always concerned with how the taxpayer's money is spent, and every time I see one of the helicopters fly by I think about how that was a tax dollar well spent."

Jace Radke is a reporter for the Las Vegas Sun. He can be reached at (702) 259-2318 or by e-mail at jace@lasvegassun.com