POLICE HELICOPTER DRAWS A GIANT DICK OVER HAMPSHIRE

A National Police Air Service helicopter went up over Hampshire on Monday night to help Thames Valley Police find a car that had failed to stop. Somewhere in that search it also produced, on public flight trackers, a shape resembling genitalia above Blackbushe Airport. Gordon Bird, 53, of Ancells Farm in Fleet, said the helicopter woke his two-year-old daughter at about 11pm as it circled overhead. He hadn't gone to bed and still had his computer on, so he looked it up, and he was "shocked" by the shape the route left behind. By his account the buzzing over the estate lasted 15 to 20 minutes, the drawing itself took about half an hour, and the full flight ran an hour. Then it circled over Ancells Farm and went home to base at Redhill. NPAS says none of it was on purpose. The crew was "orbiting the locations they were directed to" during the search, and police helicopters "do not follow defined or predetermined flight plans" because conditions on the ground keep changing. In an email to Bird, the service said it was "unfortunate that the flight path shown on public tracking apps resembles a particular shape", which is a lot of words spent avoiding one short one. For scale, Finnish Air Force cadets were disciplined in the spring for using flight patterns to draw genitalia deliberately. Bird's verdict: "I'm not angry, I am upset at the waste of resources." The one man in Britain who looked at a sky dick and thought about the budget.

Why you should give a shit: Every aircraft in the country is on a public tracker now, police included, so one Monday night pursuit in Hampshire is archived forever as a cock and balls nobody can delete.