[Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] ma'am I like y put it down is this [Music] [Applause] um my name is Lieutenant Jake Durham I am a u 20-year veteran of law enforcement I've been 18 years with the Oxford Police Department I started um in this in this profession this is what my my dad my grandfather um my uncle most of us done on the Durham side was was law enforcement so it was a really easy transition for me to get into it because I grew up around it so that's kind of it's really all I knew um when I got started into this was uh was law enforcement I'm currently with the aviation unit here at the Oxford police dep Department uh I'm the commander of the unit the unit was started in 2011 um uh since it was started I've been the executive officer of the chief I've been a patrolman and then uh in June of 2022 um I became full-time Aviation unit Commander here at the police [Music] department this is our secondary um Mission capable aircraft it's a 1969 o6 it was made by um the Hughes company uh back in the day we we actually got some historical information that this aircraft was assigned to the first cave and flew in Vietnam we we picked the aircraft up and had it brought in and and a restoration was completed on it um which included paint some interior work we had some avionics done to it uh brand new blades on the main rotor system so far it's been a fantastic helicopter it it's very inexpensive to operate uh it has no Hydraulics just as the as the primary Mission aircraft um doesn't have any uh so you feel every input that you make and this aircraft you actually fly it from the from the time that you you start the engine until you stop for the day uh it's really fun to fly they're very safe just the configuration of the aircraft alone and I'll kind of show you the the structural Integrity of these aircraft there's you know obviously the kill and everything underneath but there's an A-frame that this aircraft's built on and that allows in a in a situation where the aircraft does crash this A-frame protects uh everything because the aircraft's prone to to roll and the other components are to dissipate from the aircraft um because of that air air frame that A-frame the way it is so it's equipped with we'll go around on the other side uh it's equipped with an 8500 Fleer system uh we don't have a search lot on this aircraft we just don't have the room right now to put one and we don't have another search light but we do just just fine with the 8500 um it has a TFO station where we have the macro blue um display up front so the TFO will set on this side of the aircraft he'll manipulate the camera as needed and he'll view everything that that takes place on the macro blue screen up front um the differences between this aircraft and our primary Mission bird is this is the first iteration of the 500 series aircraft um whereas our newest one is is the latest but the systems are are essentially the same uh this has got less horsepower than our 530f it's got four rotor blades where is the other one has five um it's got a little bit less power but honestly in my opinion I think anybody who who has any experience in the o6 finds them to be more fun to fly they're just a great great helicopter and and they uh they were produced as a scout aircraft in Vietnam so they're very capable of doing what we need them to do from a public safety perspective fantastic helicopters they don't weigh a lot they don't take a lot to maintain and to operate um yeah we just love them uh I think it's really great for the city of Oxford and Public Safety in general that not only you know are we getting to use this piece of equipment for Public Safety but and personally I like the fact that we're getting to preserve a piece of American military history because this aircraft flew in Vietnam and it's still serving you know the the people of Alabama now from a public safety perspective so and I know a lot about these aircraft just because I'm interested in them but I think that's my favorite thing about it is just knowing that that this aircraft did fly in Vietnam and we're still preserving that so it can missions today uh the um Department of Defense and well Congress enacted this years ago that that when the Department of Defense this is just in its brief form where we're going to talk about the Surplus program where we got these aircraft from um they've allowed the Department of Defense to release certain equipment to uh law enforcement agencies throughout the country which I think is a fantastic program now this is anything from boots all the way up to helicopters so our first few aircraft we obtained through that Surplus program and it's run uh through the department of defenses defense Logistics agency and they have an office uh within that agency called the law enforcement support officer leso and all of this equipment that is available for law enforcement gets transferred to or Leo gets notification about it and then they they send that out to us like um aircraft and you know those kind of things so that's how we obtained our first few pieces of equipment our aircraft is through that lesso 1033 program and it was a huge help and there's there's so many agencies that have taken advantage of that throughout the country um it's a really good program especially when you don't have the Appropriations like when we started we didn't we couldn't go buy an aircraft so luckily we were able to get those through the lesso program and it really helped us get to where we are now and there's there's a lot of agencies that still use the lesso program for their aircraft and and we still have a lesso aircraft here the o6 is a lesso aircraft and I think it's just a phenomenal program a lot of the Hues that you see flying with Public Safety agencies they got those through the lesso program so yeah that's that's been a a blessing for us to have you know lesso support Public Safety agencies throughout the country like they do this this we wouldn't be able to provide some of the services that do without them so to explain the differences between um our newest aircraft the 530 versus the o6 you'll have your horizontal um I mean I'm sorry your vertical stabilizers and we call this a Vil because when they were first designed this was the um this was just a design that they came up with uh to keep us stable in flight so everybody kind of understands what a Weather Vein is is on top of the barn you see the old chicken with the you know the Weather Vein is north and south that kind of stuff that's essentially what these helicopters do when they get into uh forward flight they're going to all that wind is going to travel over the aircraft and these stabilize the aircraft during flight now throughout the years uh the engineers at MD have came up with the tail design versus the Vil um there's obviously differences in in both characteristics the way they fly and and you know different physics between both of them but they serve their purpose to keep us stable and normal flight um they both do a great job of course they don't make these anymore so we've got a couple put in the back in case we have to replace them so um but that's that's the differences between the two tails on these helicopter we can move around and take a look at the pilot station and talk about that a little bit too anybody who's flown the 500 series any any pilot will tell you that they're very Compact and you essentially strap the aircraft on and go fly I'm 63 245 250 lb and that's literally what I do every time I get in this aircraft but this is my favorite helicopter um I'll get in we'll kind of show you how I fit inside the helicopter and walk through a simple startup procedure on it one of the main things I like about this helicopter is it's very simplistic uh especially in it start um prior to starting the helicopter we're just making sure all of our switches are set for example our fuels the end control frictions those kind of things main battery comes on um we'll introduce fuel as we're starting the aircraft once the aircraft starts we'll let everything stabilize all of our temperatures and pressures and then uh Master generator let everything stabilize again and then roll it up and we're good to go it's a fun helicopter to fly it's um relatively easy to fly um there's nothing to it I mean you got to think these things are 50 years old and a lot of the same systems that are on these aircraft are used on our our current and latest iteration of the 500 series The 530f so they're they're proven um helicopters and they're great for for Public Safety uh Mission so again this is just my favorite helicopter I like this little thing so it's great we also have a uh a six degree of Freedom 6 doof full motion simulator in house and that's that's great for us to have because a lot of our tfos we encourage them to you know want to become Pilots one day we give them the option if they want to they you know we'll we'll facilitate that and we'll get them trained but um if they don't of course they don't have to but that that simulator allows not only the pilots but now the tfos to go in and start refining some of their control touch um I'll sit with them for hours and we'll talk about you know emergency procedures in the helicopter or just standard hover and maneuvering and that kind of stuff and we've got a we've got several tfos that will as long as I've got the thing on they'll sit there and they'll fly for hours and hours and hours and you know you know as an administrator that's good for me because I can I can really take inventory of my guys and say okay now know who wants to be you know a pilot or who wants to do this or who wants to do that the whole reason we purposed this or purchased this is so our guys can uh continuously have stick time in the aircraft even though it's a simulator um it it correlates so well to the real aircraft so our guys especially Nick over the past couple of months he's been on this thing for hours and hours and hours so it's a really good tool that allows them to gain as much stick time as possible before they get in that aircraft and you know they're not going to damage the aircraft of course we're going to crash the simulator which is fine so yeah these got we use it for for um emergency simulation training and like Nick's doing he's honing his skills as an upcoming pilot with a unit and this is where you start right here in the simulator and plus if we're doing emergency procedures in the simulator we're not going to crash a helicopter we're not going to end danger Personnel so you know I've got a $2.5 million piece of equipment that I'm not going to get up in and let you know just anybody do auto rotations or anything in but I can throw them in the simulator and they can crash and bang that thing all they want to and uh and they can learn and save a bunch of money and save a bunch of lives by not messing anything up so it's um we've got a lot of good equipment at Aviation um yeah and I think it's important that everybody understand that all of it kind of works together to make this thing work it's not just we have pilots and we have helicopters there's a lot more to it than that we we've got a lot of supporting equipment behind all of this now just as an example we talked about we can do our uh non-standard emergency procedure so an example of that would be you know you're flying along at 1500 ft and you lose your engine um we can go ahead and simulate this inside this piece of a inside this piece of equipment and save all of that uh wear and tear on the aircraft so we'll go ahead and do that now just to demonstrate what we're talking about okay simulated engine failure yep we'll do a simulated engine failure so right now um so Trevor is about 2,000 ft uh we're going through a simulated engine failure now you can see uh even though this is a huey aircraft which we fly the uh 500 series there's still a lot of similarities in in terms of a rotation and kind of the muscle memory that goes into it and and paying attention to your uh to your instruments and air speed and those kind of things so it it gives the pilot a really good opportunity to hone their skills uh in those type of situations because the instruments and the air speed and those kind of things are basically going to be the same we want to keep a a positive rate of rotor RPM a certain air speed and our Maneuvers at the bottom are essentially going to be the same as they would in any aircraft it's really nice to have um of course you I mean on that Landing you exceeded the Telemetry setting so go ahead and do hit start again this one down here mhm so that's a good example um this particular Landing was a little too hard so the Telemetry settings on the simulator it exceeded those so that allows us to go back in with a with a single push of a button and reset those versus having them in the aircraft where if we would have had a hard Landing we would have had to taking the aircraft in for maintenance and and spent thousands of dollars to potentially make a repair so from from personal experience how important um this this piece of equipment is is I spent a lot of time in early part of 2023 uh I had some medical conditions that that prohibited me from being at work so I was out of the aircraft for quite a while so prior to getting back in the aircraft I came in and I spent um probably 20 hours on the simulator and the correlation between the simulator and the control touch and getting inside the actual aircraft it helped me transition back into the helicopter no doubt so you know 20 hours of oper operation is going to be thousands of dollars you know Aviation is all about proficiency whether you're in maintenance or the pilot side or the TFO side where we're having to manipulate the the controls of the mission equipment so my proficiency level had definitely gone down but I was able to build that back up to a comfortable state to when I got back in the aircraft it wasn't all foreign to me again you know if that makes sense I mean even though we've got plenty of time in the aircraft but when you start losing that proficiency level it's nice to have a tool where you can jump in and and regain that if you need [Music] to [Applause] [Music] going to a suspicious person's call um color color is not on scene she said her 14-year-old is home alone and there is a person knocking on the door and they have showed up several times they want us to go like the bum has showed up several times over the past few weeks 7:35 C so we're going to go check it out and see if we can't make contact and and see what's up why just keep knocking on the door3 she was not 1023 she was going to call herter back so um our helicopter is in the air now over the scene and is trying to look for the suspect and suspect vehicle so if they make contact in the air if they see the helicopter if they see the vehicle and or the person from the air they'll let us know and direct us to it and we'll we'll try to go make contact with them9 all right so he's making a traffic traffic stop on that vehicle now try to catch back up here to them and get out with them 735 code 5 760 simp there's not okay hey how's it going man good yes sir do what now happen oh no sir everything's good just give me one second let me get with this other officer just hang out okay where is he did you ask where he's coming from I asked him where y headed care he said he's taking his his Grand's house just picked up has two agency F traffic 24 in cash also has aliens for traffic 67 cash got your seat belt on baby I see you good deal got make sure you don't have anything on you you're okay with that okay you good with that there yeah cigarett good you're good turn coming from where uh my grand my sign Liv right up the road right there across from the other Church and two little trailers right there come up the other Road come down I live right over here on Street you ain't been knocking on no doors in no neighborhoods or nothing like that no I just got off work I got you work at Express yes one here in town yes okay cool what I want you to do myner got to go make a phone call real quick and I come back talk to you how long you been working there uh since January since January you like it uh yeah it's all right pit man so I ain't really got to deal with too many people that's good yeah I just get dirty as hell it's a job right yeah turn up yeah had a new star every week yeah that's how it goes when you work with your hands so is somebody saying I've been knocking on doors possibly I don't know I call my boss no no we good you're good it ain't no problem hey yall know anything about the airplane that's been flying around here lately which one uh it's it's like a gray kind of like navy color and I believe it's got American flag on the back of it like it's just one flying and circling up that way is it got big props on it is a pretty big plane or pretty small it's pretty big yeah so uh c130s come through a lot and they land at the andison airport they do a lot of training out here at the airport so that's probably what it is oh okay yeah they come through they fly over my house all the time too I've been seeing it the past couple days and I was like cuz his fly is kind of low and I'm like they taking off or Landing back that way and then yeah they do a bunch of training at the airport right here so as far as I know nothing's going on tomorrow that's what I40 cash 670 got your son in your car you got the man bom out take care that somebody supposed go to week I got you but apparently you're supposed to go toport before or failed to pay or something like that that's why you have two so I need where you you working Express where on uh 78 78 uh right there beside L me yeah beside lost me okay 78 East okay okay I got I okay that's the one he said 78 I didn't think yeah we got two location in you a hug break head on care D this have a better day make sure you come see me tomorrow morning go back to that yeah we'll go we'll go talk to her real quick yeah yeah that's fine you got it all [Music] right so that officer he got probable calls to stop that vehicle and we identified him um whether he is the one that has been knocking on her door we do not know but he is identified if something else comes up then we do have a a suspect he ended up having a couple of warrants we warned him about those and advised him to take care of them we got a current address if he chooses not to take care of those we can come pick him we can go pick him up so it's difficult to balance all the responsibilities that go into um being the aviation unit commander and and personal life and then some some other projects that I'm working with uh the police department and the City of Oxford um early on in my career I didn't understand the importance of that balance um but the later in life you know I realized that I have to prioritize things because this is not to be too philosophical about it but all of this is very temporary and my family is extremely important to me we have five kids um they range from 15 to seven so I don't ever want to regret again not spending time with my kids when I had the opportunity so that balance has has shifted um quite drastically over the years where I I was more oriented towards work and and accomplishing the goals for Aviation unit and the police department and all but now that's kind of had to stop so I do what I can while I'm at work um if I have to stay over I will which is quite often usually every week I'm I'm working a little bit from home or I'll stay over a little bit but um it's easier now because my primary focus is on my family so the balance then versus now is not as difficult because I I understand what's really [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] important [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] oh