Dispelling Drone Myths: The government is using drones, but not in the way you think!
David: Hey everybody! Welcome back to the Aerial Influence channel. I'm David Plummer, and this is Michael Ferguson and we are Aerial Influence. This is episode number three of our series Dispelling Drone Myths. Today we're going to talk about the government and how they're using drones. I think a lot of people are curious about how the government is using drones. They probably have some misconceptions about how the government is using drones. But how have we seen our government clients using drones for police and search and rescue fire?
Michael: I would say the main things that they're doing are accident reconstruction and search and rescue. Someone goes missing, whether it's a kid, or somebody wanders off from a facility where they have dementia or Alzheimer's and they walk away. Time is of the essence. It's beneficial for everyone.
The second thing is accident reconstruction. When you've got a crash scene, you have to close down a road, sometimes a major road, that can be for multiple hours, see the drone can capture a lot of the data quickly, efficiently, and with precision instead of six hours. It's a fraction of that amount of time. That way they open up things faster.
David: You're not going to have as many traffic jams because it's going to take them 20 minutes basically and send the drone up, get all those pictures. Whereas in the past it would take a lot longer with people on the ground, using the RTK base stations, it's going to be a much longer process than it would be to do it with a drone. The other thing that people are using it for, obviously it's search and rescue, but specifically in search and rescue, you got thermal imaging cameras now. So we're not talking about just having a drone up in the sky looking, we're talking about having a drone up in the sky in the middle of the night and dark, being able to see heat signatures of people. So you could have people on the ground trying to find somebody, and they may not be able to see them, but you got a drone with thermal on it, they're going to be able to check it out. They will be able to see that person there and guide the people on the ground to the correct spot. So you've also got it now where you get speakers on some of these. So we've got a speaker on the Mavic 2 Enterprise Dual.
Michael: So if you can't get to somebody right away, there's not necessarily a two-way communication, but I've seen an ad where someone is holding onto a rock in a river, and basically, they're saying hold on help is on the way. So it at least allows that person to be identified, the location, also reassuring that person help is on the way…
David:…and dropping things to people as well. Like you need to lower our rope or something to someone, you could do that eventually.
Michael: Right, right. One thing that we would dispel is that they're not just taking the drone up perching and looking into a crowd and waiting for someone to break the law. So it's not a spying tool. When a drone is implemented into a department, it has specific uses each time the drone is used, whether it's for search and rescue or if it's for crash scene reconstruction. They have a set of procedures that they're going by when they send it up. We gather the information around the crash, we identify all the possible skid marks, where one car ended up, the other car ended up, if there was debris or whatever. And then the same thing is true for search and rescue. They're probably hooking up with the ground crew. The flight crew or the drone crew is then communicating back to the ground crew. We've had a situation where they've been able to locate somebody that's been hurt. That person couldn't communicate. They were within feet of that person on the ground crew. But because you had tall grass, they couldn't see him. That was the crazy thing, that you had a ground crew that was basically on top of their subject and couldn't see it. And it was the drone that helped him put it together.
David: So the question that we started with was, how is the government using drones right now? Specifically, search and rescue. That is really the main one right now. I would say I think a lot of municipalities are starting to adopt them more for city planning, different things like that. So yes, in that regard, I think drones can be very beneficial, like the Phantom 4 RTK in terms of mapping out an area or something like that, that could be beneficial to a city or a town municipality. So definitely drones are being used in the government. They're not going anywhere.
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Michael: As always, thank you for listening. We're excited to share the future of drones with you.