オレンジ郡保安官航空ユニット：Bell 407

The Orange County Sheriff’s Office is strictly a law-enforcement aviation section, so our mission is strictly law enforcement.

Our bread and butter is the law-enforcement mission, so it’s search and apprehension for bad guys—patrol support, primarily.

So, if patrol is following vehicles, pursuing somebody, or we have somebody flee on foot, those are all the things that we get called out for to help them with. We do some small search operations, but not usually the rescue portion.

We’re not equipped with a hoist or anything like that, but we’ll be called out for missing persons or overdue boaters, and we assist the fire department with fire mapping.

The Bell 407 works for us because our jurisdiction is actually so large that we need the speed of a 407 to transition from one side of the county to the other for calls for service.

Also, we are the only law-enforcement aviation unit for the entire county, which means we serve all the municipalities and federal agencies doing law-enforcement work here.

So, the 407 is the perfect ship for us.

There are 13 municipalities within Orange County that we support. We also supplement the surrounding counties if, for whatever reason, they need to take a break to refuel while they’re flying a mission. We’ll provide overwatch while they break and take care of whatever they need to take care of for the counties to the north, west, east and south.

We fly two different helicopter airframes: the [Bell] 4[12] and the 407. Annually, we do recurrent training in each airframe. We tend to space it out, so every six months we’re doing autos in one or the other airframe.

Well, I think the 407 is definitely a very capable aircraft. I’ve flown seven or eight different models of helicopters over my tenure as a commercial helicopter and airplane pilot, and I think the Bell 407 is probably my favorite.

As far as a standard patrol mission with a camera and a searchlight on it, it’s fantastic—but it is a multi-role helicopter.

It’s got a hard point on the bottom. You can put the bucket on if you’re doing long-line work or fire work. We also happen to have a couple sets of TSOP platforms, so for doing SWAT insertions and things like that, it’s a good platform for that.

We fly low level. We fly in a very crowded airspace environment here in Orlando—one of the busiest airspace environments in the country. We’re in a very helicopter-heavy environment here.

We’ve got four news ships that fly regularly here in Orlando. We’ve got half a dozen to a dozen tourist helicopters that fly down our tourist area. If we’re working a large critical incident down in the tourist corridor, there’s no denying the fact that we could have two or three tour helicopters, two or three news helicopters, law enforcement and maybe medical aircraft.

We could have six or eight helicopters working in close proximity.

Some of the technology that we have now—the ADS-B, traffic alerts and TCAS—is phenomenal. It’s a great addition. It certainly makes us much safer, and it makes my job much easier when flying the aircraft.

It is certainly a multi-role helicopter, but from a pilot’s perspective, it’s a very capable ship. It’s very fast and has plenty of power.

I don’t ever find myself in a situation thinking, “Boy, I wish I could go faster. I wish I had more power.” I have flown them at higher altitudes as well, and all the way around, it’s a very capable ship.