By all accounts, Gloucester Airport in the UK's west country is becoming a playground for business aviation's up and coming. Steven Judd is pilot/marketing and sales for Police/Medical/Specialist Aviation Services, whose facilities include a JAR 145 maintenance base, pilot, police observers and paramedic training, and aircraft modification and completion centre.

He told EBAN: "If I look round, it's a veritable building site. There are hangars going up left, right and centre here. Just recently, Oxford Air Training School opened a new training school right next door to us and there is an inordinate amount of aviation hangarage going up.

There are 10 or 12 companies who have got their businesses located here on the airfield.

"Additionally, a new lounge area for the airport itself has been built. The whole profile of the place is being raised considerably."

With its main operating base at Gloucester Airport, Police/Medical/Specialist Aviation Services operates five MD Explorers, eight AS355s, five BO105s and four Britten-Norman Islanders. Its aircraft are used for a variety of purposes including police, HEMS, minor ad hoc photo, taxi and corporate operations.

A sizeable chunk of the company's business involves aircraft modification and completion work, with the optional extras of pilotage and maintenance. To this end, it has just taken delivery of the Virgin HEMS 902 which came into the UK in the first half of July.

Judd said: "They've got a Dauphin that's getting a bit long in the tooth and they were looking at all the midsize twins to see what the best selection would be. Whilst the 902 is slightly smaller than the Dauphin, as all of these are, the noise and safety aspects were paramount in their selections. What's more, of all the new generation [helicopters], the Explorer has the largest usable cabin space, albeit smaller than what they currently have."

In addition, the company is currently preparing 902s for West Yorkshire Police and also Greater Manchester Police and in the not too distant future, will commence work on Lincolnshire and Notting-hamshire's air ambulances. Said Judd: "The medical NHS Trust's and police constabularies all seem to be very similar in that they want to be individual. There are a number of forums that we get involved in, both medical and law enforcement type, where we attend to talk and listen. "At the end of the day, we aren't prescriptive - it's up to them to tell us what they want and ask us how we can accommodate that. In our experience, they all want their own bespoke bit of kit and all have their own ideas."

Judd says that the company's police work is currently more abundant than its HEMS work simply because "there are many more police air support units around than there are air ambulance units". Nonetheless, he says growth in the area of emergency services is now seen to be in the air ambulance arena. He said: "While at the moment, the percentage of work we receive is probably 75 per cent police and the rest medical, it must be said that the police market is rapidly reaching saturation."

Charter work, says Judd, is not big on the company's agenda (perhaps 5 or 10 per cent, of the whole business) but can be requested at any time. On the day on which we spoke, the M5 had been closed because of an accident. Judd said: "We took an ITN TV crew to look at it. We've done TV filming with them before so they know us and know we can provide a service at the last minute."

With regards to the company's many names, Judd explained: "Police Aviation Services was set up in 1984 and Medical Aviation Services in 1986/7. Although these are two separate companies, they are both one and the same essentially. The holding company for both is Specialist Aviation Services.

"We are now launching the name of Specialist Aviation Services - in addition to, not instead of, Police and Medical Aviation Services - because we want to advertise more of our capabilities to a wider market. We have significant approvals from the CAA and the feeling is that we can generate work through the name of Specialist Aviation Services, to these non-police and non-medical organisations, whether its a corporate customer, private owner or whatever.

"We've grown with this twin-track PAS and MAS and now we want to develop the completions aspect so we're using the name we already have and has always been in the background. It's not just corporate, it might be offshore organisations. We're not putting any boundary on it, its not necessarily UK either."