Drone flights
Version Date: 29/04/2025
The Alliance Operations Department has provided the following information.
- How many drone flights have been piloted by your constabulary in Q1 2025? An approximation would be appreciate if a precise number is not available.
Between 1 January 2025 and 31 March 2025 there were 868 individual drone flights across Devon and Cornwall. This is broken down to 187 separate ‘deployments’ – where one ‘deployment’ may involve more than one consecutive drone flight, or multiple drones operating at the same deployment/incident.
- How many of these flights were in the Plymouth region?
There were 28 ‘deployments’ (of the 187 deployments mentioned in question 1) within the Plymouth area, however we are unable to say how many total individual flights took place as our recording occurs across two separate systems and would involve significant work to identify which of the 868 total flights took place in Plymouth.
Please note, trying to identify the number of flights that occurred in Plymouth would take this request over the 18 hour threshold and the entire request would be considered over fees. If we allow five minutes per flight it would take over 72 hours, even using a much more conservative estimate of two minutes per flight it would take just under 29 hours.