My primary interest in drones is not SAR drones. But this thread did lead me to think about the value of doing a better SAR drone. The main drawback that I see to such work is that the SAR drone needs to be up in the air for a long time ... A long loiter time over the rescue area. Hence it should use an engine running on combustible fuel. That is OK from a tech standpoint. But any drone can crash. So the real hangup is that if an SAR drone goes down, it should not start a fire. If the drone crashes and causes a forest fire, that is a counterproductive outcome ... To say the least. This concern is not a major one, but it can't be ignored.

On the positive side ... The drone could be equipped with various sensors - making it pretty useful to the SAR team.

I really do like the idea of collecting a lot of HD video footage and then passing it to an "observer team" to scan very carefully. That really would add extra eyes and brains to the search team, without needing to put extra people on foot on the ground.

We should keep thinking about this.

Pete


Edited by Pete (01/01/14 06:01 AM)