Police helicopter

A police helicopter running down a speedboat at sunset in Trailer 2, close enough to read POLICE along the tail boom and VICE-DALE around the star badge on its nose.

The helicopter fills the right-hand side of the frame at 2:27.30, banked over the water with the sun low behind it. The body is white with a green stripe running along the bottom of the fuselage. POLICE is set in green capitals down the tail boom. On the nose sits a gold star badge in a circle, the kind a sheriff's department uses, and curving around it in green is the word VICE-DALE, hyphen included.

Below the cabin, a dark angled strut carries a skid: this aircraft lands on skids rather than wheels. One rotor blade sweeps across the frame with a yellow-painted tip, and the rotor head is visible above the cabin. Through the side window a figure is just discernible in the cockpit.

The helicopter is not alone in the shot. Ahead and below it runs the wooden-decked speedboat it is chasing, wake streaming off both quarters, with two people in the open cockpit and one of them turned around to face backwards.

How to recognise it

• POLICE in green capitals along the tail boom
• Gold star badge on the nose with VICE-DALE curving around it
• White fuselage with a green stripe along the lower edge
• Skid landing gear on an angled strut
• Yellow-tipped main rotor blade

The frame it comes from

The frame is Trailer 2 at 2:27.30. It is 1920 by 1080, and the vehicle occupies 576 by 627 of it. Also in it: a wooden-deck speedboat.

What we still do not know

• What Vice-Dale is. It reads like a jurisdiction rather than a place you drive to, and nothing else in our material names it.
• The type and the manufacturer. No maker's badge is legible.
• Whether this is the same airframe as the news helicopter in the press pack, in a different livery
• Everything measured: top speed, handling, whether it can be flown

A note on this record

This frame was in our database under the wrong vehicle. It was logged as the L35P Police Boat on the strength of POLICE lettering that was assumed to be on a hull. Looking at it properly, the rotor, the skid and the tail boom are all in the crop, and there is no boat. Corrected on 14 September 2026, and the frame is now this page's main image.