Police Helicopter’s Flight Path Gets Cocky

For about half an hour, a police helicopter drew what appeared to be a penis in the skies above Hampshire, according to aircraft-tracking websites. The National Police Air Service insists this was not deliberate, which leaves the public with the rare spectacle of extremely suggestive policing carried out entirely by accident.

Residents in the Hampshire countryside heard the helicopter circling low on Monday evening. Gordon Bird, 53, from Ancells Farm in Fleet, said the aircraft flew over houses for at least 15 minutes and woke his daughter.

When he checked flight-tracking websites to see what it had been doing, he was “shocked” to discover a route resembling male genitalia above Blackbushe Airport.

“The actual buzzing around our estate lasted for 15 or 20 minutes, the actual drawing of the phallus … took about half an hour, and the overall flight, as per flight radar-type websites, show it as being an hour,” he told the BBC.

“I’m not angry, I am upset at the waste of resources.”

NPAS denied that the phallus-like figure was intentional. It said the helicopter had been helping officers on the ground track a car whose driver was refusing to stop, rather than taking part in a particularly elaborate piece of aerial graffiti.

A spokesman for NPAS, which provides police aviation services across England and Wales, said: “Flights do not follow defined or predetermined flight plans as they, by their very nature, are dynamic and respond to ever changing, and unpredictable, circumstances on the ground.

“The flight was conducted for a legitimate policing purpose, in support of Thames Valley Police.”

There was no suggestion that the officers had planned the shape in advance, and no disciplinary action was announced. The service’s explanation is simply that the helicopter’s movements were dictated by the pursuit below, with the resulting image emerging only when its route was displayed on tracking websites.

Pilots have, however, used those websites to produce deliberate pictures before. In August, one flew an eight-mile formation above Clacton-on-Sea shaped like a bin, a nod to Count Binface while he was challenging Nigel Farage in a snap by-election.

Elsewhere, an aviation enthusiast in Poland proposed to his fiancée by tracing the words “marry me” for viewers of Flightradar24.

The Finnish Air Force faced a less romantic example earlier this year when cadet pilots drew phallus-shaped routes over central Finland. The force said those responsible were students on a military reserve course and would face “disciplinary” measures.

In Hampshire, though, the official position remains that the hour-long flight was legitimate, the car was the intended target and the half-hour anatomical outline was merely an unfortunate by-product of dynamic policing.