Uneven distribution
One of the things that struck me most forcibly during my years managing base operations was how unevenly the problem was distributed and how completely invisible it was in every role beyond the cockpit.
Take the tactical flight officer (TFO). Of all the roles in police aviation, the TFO sits in the most consistently complex operating environment and carries the least formal human measurement across their career.
There is no CAA licence framework for TFOs. Before the National Police Air Service was created in 2013, selection criteria varied significantly between forces with no national standard at all.
NPAS attempted to address that and it was an improvement. But the standardisation effort carried a flaw that persisted.
Demands on TFOs were changing, the people arriving at selection were changing, and the instruments being used to measure them were still confirming aptitude without surfacing how each individual would actually function when the complexity of the role exceeded what any selection scenario could replicate.
Standardised process did not produce standardised insight. A TFO managing an armed deployment is simultaneously directing ground units, maintaining positional awareness, applying legislation in real time, and communicating with a pilot who may have a structurally different processing pattern, all in conditions that can change within seconds.
I recruited and trained TFOs across multiple forces. The question of how each person would perform when load spiked and certainty ran out was never answered by any instrument I had.
Base managers are charged with making deployment decisions. Image: NPAS
Then there is base management itself, which is where the problem becomes, in my view, most acute and most invisible.
The base manager sits at the intersection of two systems running in opposite directions.
From above: senior officers managing serious incidents, expecting aviation capability immediately.
From below: aircrew and TFOs already at operational load, carrying the weight of the sorties they have just flown and the incidents they have just witnessed, sometimes the kind that change people, not just procedures.
The base manager absorbs pressure from two directions and makes deployment decisions, task acceptance, shift extension, crew assignment – all with direct safety implications.
In this way, the base manager is the membrane between senior command expecting immediate capability and crews already at operational load.
No instrument currently tells them where each person sits on the spectrum between functional and overloaded – including themselves.
At the senior leadership level, the filtered picture that reaches the top of any aviation organisation is the least complete view of what is actually happening.
Senior leaders are currently forming opinions about the human layer of their operation without the data that would make those opinions accurate. There is a dimension to this that is often missed.
The senior leader and the base manager can and should access their own baseline first. The analogy that aviation professionals will recognise is the pre-flight oxygen mask instruction: fit your own before attempting to help others.
The principle is not about selfishness. It is about the recognition that a person operating without oxygen cannot reliably help anyone around them.
A base manager whose own load is unmonitored is making deployment decisions from a compromised position; not through any lack of skill, but because the instrument that would show them their own state has never been switched on.
A senior leader who cannot see their own drift cannot accurately calibrate what they see beneath them. The passport of experience applies to them first, not last.
