Modern-day policing would lose a considerable advantage without support from the air. The Air Support Unit is involved in searching for missing persons, protecting mass gatherings and other events, pursuing criminals, controlling the state border, managing road traffic, and carrying out criminal police operations.
There are countless cases in which helicopters can effectively come to the rescue, save precious lives or prevent severe outcomes. Emergency helicopter assistance is a very important aspect of policing. Helicopter crews sometimes operate in high-risk circumstances, dealing with seemingly impossible situations. They save lives on a daily basis, providing assistance in places that are too difficult to reach by other means and transporting injured and sick people from the scene of accidents to hospital within an exceptionally short time. A high-performance multi-purpose transport AgustaWestland AW169 helicopter was acquired in 2019.
As an integral part of the national system of public security and the system of civil protection, rescue and assistance, the unit is irreplaceable when it comes to saving lives and property. The unit performs air ambulance transportation, inter-hospital patient transfers and incubator transportation of premature babies. The duties of the Air Support Unit also include mountain rescue operations, while its assistance is also indispensable in firefighting and in the event of floods and other natural disasters.
With its transportation capacity, the unit assists various departments within the police and external users, for example the Alpine Association of Slovenia. There are certainly many possible uses of aircraft in policing, and new technologies will expand the possibilities further.
We pay a lot of attention to maintaining top competence of crews and everyone else involved in flight operations and maintaining and upgrading the technical equipment of helicopters, which is a prerequisite for safe and effective work. In the future, we aim to modernise and unify the fleet and ensure a more balanced availability of the Air Support Unit in all parts of the country.
