With the city in the middle of a budget crisis, Sgt. Trent Crump acknowledges it's probably a bad time for the Phoenix Police Department to break in a new $4.15 million surveillance plane.

Crump said he understands the plane likely will raise eyebrows among residents, because Phoenix also is eliminating jobs and cutting employees' pay.

But the police spokesman said the department didn't have many options when it acquired the Pilatus PC-12 Spectre single-engine plane in September. That's when funding became available from a voter-approved 2006 public-safety bond, which also paid for a crime lab and police stations.

Crump said the bond money could not be used to pay for officers or to supplement the city's general fund.

"There are things from 2006 we would like to take back, but we can't reallocate bond money," Crump said.

The plane is used to more safely conduct aerial surveillance and to extradite prisoners.

The pressurized plane, which has a capacity for nine passengers and two pilots, is in a hangar at Phoenix Deer Valley Airport. In the next few months, a few seats will come out and it will be fitted for a special camera and a viewing monitor that will allow officers to conduct surveillance above 9,000 feet. The additional equipment will cost about $600,000, also coming from bond proceeds.

Crump said the department since 2003 has wanted to add another plane to its fleet that includes three Cessnas bought in 1979, 1981 and 1986.

The older planes sometimes cannot be used in the summer because they have no air-conditioning, he said, and they are unsafe to fly at high altitudes when the temperature in the Valley exceeds 104 degrees. The new plane has air-conditioning, and because it can fly at a higher altitude, it won't have the same restrictions the other planes have when flying around Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport.

Crump said the new plane gives Phoenix the option of using it to extradite prisoners back to the Valley. The Maricopa County Sheriff's Office stopped providing that service last year because of budget cuts, and Crump said the new plane has done four extraditions so far. He added that the seating capacity in the older planes is too small to extradite prisoners.

As the city has waited to add a camera to the new plane, it has been used to fly detectives in and out of state to work on 10 homicide cases and gang, drug-enforcement and street-crimes investigations. The new plane has been in the sky for a little more than 115 hours, with nearly 55 hours devoted to training. It costs about $200 an hour to operate the plane.

The Pilatus is popular with U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the Air Force and the Bureau of Land Management to monitor large geographic areas and quickly move personnel, said Mike Haenggi, vice president of marketing for Pilatus Business Aircraft Ltd. in Colorado.

Haenggi said Phoenix is the first municipality to buy such a plane from his company, whose international headquarters is in Switzerland.

He said the plane, which will have a restroom, is capable of circling in the air for up to seven hours at high altitudes.

"It's a great asset to have," Haenggi said. "It has tremendous capabilities, and it can do a lot of things you can't do with a helicopter."

Reach the reporter at craig.harris@arizonarepublic.com.