WildfiresFirefighters, FAA weighing the use of drones for wildfires

With the wildfire season already claiming land and homes in the Western United States, federal government firefighters are considering the use of drones outfitted with cameras to map out the size and speed of a wildfire.

Drones could one day replace manned aircrafts, thus eliminating the potential of injuries or death of pilots and firefighters.

The New York Times reports, however, that the plan is being delayed by the Federal Aviation Administration(FAA), which regulates the use of drones in open airspace.

Current FAA regulations prohibit UAVs from operating while out of sight of a ground-based pilot, meaning the distance, or the smoke of a fire which blocks the pilot’s view of the UAV, would result in a violation.

“In terms of federal regulations right now, we can’t use U.A.S.’s out there except on a very limited basis,” Ron Hanks, the aviation safety and training officer at the Federal Forest Servicetold the Times.

Four years ago a drone was used in an Alaskan wildfire and was able to pinpoint the hotspots within the fire, as well as navigate through thick smoke – smoke which led to manned aircraft being banned from flying in the area.

“The smoke was so thick no one was flying — that’s why they came to us,” said Rosanne Bailey of the Alaska Center for Unmanned Aircraft Systems Integrationat the University of Alaska Fairbanks. “We could fly and see the borders of the fire using infrared.”

Kent Slaughter, the acting manager of the Bureau of Land Management’s Alaska Fire Service, says it took four days to get FAA approval to get the UAV up during the fire, but today the process would take about a day.

Privacy concerns have also slowed the process of adding the drones to firefighters’ repertoire and could be costing lives at the same time.

“Firefighting is a great example of how unmanned aircraft” are able “to determine the range of a fire, the intensity of a fire, without jeopardizing lives,” Senator Mark Begich, (D-Alaska) told the Times. “That’s a unique application, especially in my state, in Colorado, in California.”

The Forest Service, part of the Department of Agriculture, has studied drone use for the last several years, but according to Hanks, the agency is still determining how valuable the drones would be in assisting traditional firefighting methods.

“We are still developing policies internally, what the cost benefit would be,” Hanks told the Times. The drones “would be competing against what we could do aerially against a helicopter or a light fixed-wing airplane.”