Photo: Tom Turner
According to the NYPD, you won’t even recognize that it’s there, but high above the heads of New York City’s citizens, there is a $10 million special NYPD helicopter with an impressive arsenal of surveillance equipment inside it. The chopper, called “23″, looks like a plain helicopter on the outside, but on the inside it is chock-full of hi-tech gadgetry, most of it intended to protect the people on the ground from terrorist attacks.
The helicopter’s unmarked paint job belies what’s inside: an arsenal of sophisticated surveillance and tracking equipment powerful enough to read license plates — or scan pedestrians’ faces — from high above the nation’s largest metropolis.
Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly has said that no other U.S. law enforcement agency “has anything that comes close” to the surveillance chopper, which was designed by engineers at Bell Helicopter and computer technicians based on NYPD specifications.
The chopper is named simply “23″ — for the number of police officers killed in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
This is an example of how powerful the surveillance equipment on the helicopter is:
Without leaving Manhattan airspace, the chopper also was able to get a crystal-clear picture of jetliners waiting to take off from LaGuardia Airport and to survey Kennedy International Airport’s jet fuel lines, which were targeted in a plot uncovered last year.
Pretty insane and pretty awesome at the same time. I’ll be on the lookout for this chopper from now on.
Completely and supremely UNTRUE as to the capabilities specified in the description this helicopter. This heli is NOT physically capable of getting a crystal clear shot of planes leaving from LaGuardia from MANHATTAN with any aviation based camera. What this particular heli is equipped with is a real-time based “CCTV-like” monitoring system linked into NUMEROUS land based cameras INCLUDING both JFK and LGA airports as well as the infamous citywide street light-pole mounted NYPD surveillance cameras. They also have a few vans with this capabilty with the credit going to the marriage of city D.oI.T. NYPD STAT-COM, and other agencies as well as I.B.M.
I have stood in front of this bird on three separate occasions as well as taken pictures standing on the landing skid. I have shaken the hand of the commanding officer of the unit which heads the Aviation Unit within the NYPD which is the SOD (Special Operations Division). His name is Chief Charles (Chuck)(Chief K) Kammerdener. I have seen this bird first hand and can tell you that the part about reading license plates is true. Faces may be a little more difficult. I know two pilots within the Aviation unit, and one tells me that this is one of the units in which the Mayor is flown to functions regarding city business because of it’s inconspicuity. He is also known to have his own corporate helicopter tail the NYPD helo on city business related functions with his security detail of NYPD Detectives, and when the function is over he departs on his own chopper for personal business to avoid the possible press implications of improper use of taxpayer money. The Mayor is known to have his own pilot’s license and when he requests to pilot this particular helicopter, it is a request that rarely if EVER met with denial.
While this technology is abreast of many local law-enforcement agencies, it is nothing spectacular to ANYTHING that the federal law-enforcement agencies employ in the war on terror, organized crime, or drugs. You must simply take into account the finacial scope of let’s say a random city like Tampa, Florida. I am certain that they do not have an annual operational budget just short of 3.9 billion, nor can they afford several state-of the art helicopters like the NYPD, or have over 100 Detectives working with the feds placed in locations like Madrid, Kabul, Turkey, China, Istanbul, Tel-Aviv, Scotland Yard, etc. An old addage can be modified and applied here: Reports of the capability of this helicopter are…GREATLY exaggerated.