THE Wiltshire Air Ambulance charity is confident it can raise the £10.5 million needed over the next three years to keep its new state-of-the-art helicopter flying.

Running the Bell 429, which flew its first mission last Friday, costs £2.5m a year – or £6,850 a day – and entirely from public donations.

It can only stay in its base at Devizes Police Headquarters for three years, so building a new base is bringing another challenge, to find an extra £3m.

It is the first time the county has had a dedicated air ambulance, having shared an aircraft with the police for the last 24 years. The leased helicopter can reach anywhere in the county within 11 minutes.

Chief executive David Philpott said: “How do we know we can raise enough? We just do. There is no scenario where we won’t.

"It’s a bit like someone once asked Elton John, ‘What would you do if suddenly your records stopped selling and you never made any more money?’ “And he said, ‘But it ain’t gonna happen.’

“The financial year that just ended in October, we topped £2.5m, so we’ve hit that target. So, we’re confident, but we’re not arrogant. Nor are we flippant, as we have the smallest population, in Wiltshire and Swindon, of any other constituency served by an air ambulance charity.

“If you look at the Kent, Surrey and Sussex one, for example, they have a population of 4.3 million to fundraise from. We have 684,000 people.

“But we are already generating £3.56 per person in Wiltshire, which is quite staggering. It’s incredibly generous.

“It’s not a question of whether there will be support; there will always be support, because the public have a great appetite to support their air ambulance, as with hospices, because they have an appeal across all needs.

“We need to continue to be community-focused, making sure the Scout sending in his pocket money is treated with the same degree of respect and recognition as the high network philanthropist who might want to build a training room for us in memory of his late wife.”

He said the charity’s strategic objective was to not raise more money than it needed.

“If we’re just accumulating funds, that then goes into a bank. That means a woman’s refuge in Trowbridge or a little community toy library in Warminster is not getting a slice of the pie, because it’s all coming to us,” he said.

“We want to always measure our success by how many missions we do, how many lives we save, the scarcity of complaint letters that we have and how quickly we deal with them, the number of volunteers that we have and the meaningful engagements that we have with them.

“The real heroes are not our staff, but the WI groups and the schools, and our patients who survive and go on to become our greatest fundraisers.

“If we continue to tell their stories, the funds will come in.”

The new helicopter base is expected to be made known in the next three months.

Mr Philpott said: “We’re getting very, very close to identifying a preferred location out of four and we’re in the early stages of dialogue with the planners.

“They’re all within seven nautical miles of Devizes.”