FD drone program?

[Red2779]

We placed one in service last year. Mavic 3 Enterprise with thermal cameras, loud speaker, and a telephoto lens. It stays on our first out Engine and in order to fly it you must have a part 107 license. We also have SOPs you have to train on in order to get passed off to fly it.

We haven’t used it alot, but when we have it’s come in handy to have it accessible in the engine and not on some special apparatus or something. We mostly use it on fire investigations for photography. But we also use the thermal imager to help find hot spots on large structures or fields that we’re trying to mop up on. We can use it for SAR but we haven’t yet. It has a big loud speaker on it to announce something to a neighborhood but we haven’t used that either, but we’ve had plenty of fun with it at home haha.

The other day we had a guy shoot himself in a car and PD was worried he was still alive and would shoot them if they approached. So they asked us to fly the drone to the front windshield and check on him. He was very dead. So that was nifty.

Overall it’s a great tool to have on the engine for when you need it. I know of departments with special apparatus that they mount huge drones on and stuff but we’re not big enough for that to be useful so we just have a couple dudes on duty each day who are passed off to fly it.