Firefighting agencies are increasingly turning to drones to help them extinguish fires that can easily overwhelm their ground-based crews.  Even fixed wing aircraft and helicopters can only fly so close to a raging blaze without posing a safety risk to their pilots and crews.  And manned vehicles can only fly during daylight hours, while drones equipped with infrared cameras can fly 24-7, and can zoom near the heart of a blaze to gather critical data on its intensity and likely trajectory.  Drones can also deliver badly needed food and supplies to weary firefighting crews, and some larger and heavier UAVs equipped with water tanks and nozzles can even help douse a raging fire.

In the past, award-winning drone companies like Draganfly have provided firefighting drones to provincial governments in Canada – but they’ve typically operated on the margins.  Veteran firefighters still worry that adding UAVs will only complicate their fire control efforts – and they often seek to downplay and de-limit drone use. In fact,  without clear guidance, it’s not always clear how manned and unmanned aircraft and their respective personnel can best work together.  But what if a single remote pilot were authorized to deploy and coordinate an entire fleet of firefighting drones? Could UAVs then move to the very center of an agency’s fire suppression strategy, displacing more conventional vehicles?

This summer Canada, alarmed at the increasing scope and destructiveness of its seasonal blazes, became one of the first countries to authorize the use of drone “swarms” to conduct fire-fighting operations nationwide and to do so with Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) authority.  That means a single drone operating from a remote command center can now direct the far-reaching operations of up to 30 different UAVs.  The pilot can even deploy them in distinct tactical missions, as needed, either alone or in tandem with conventional manned aircraft.  It’s a huge breakthrough.

The company behind the new drone fleet operations, In-Flight Data, has won numerous awards for its pioneering UAV operations.  Its new drone fleet authorization allows the company to fly up to 2,500 feet, day or night, in Class F and Class G airspace.  According to the company, “simultaneous drone operations, or SIMOPS, is a specific type of advanced drone operation, where an advanced pilot is able to control multiple aircraft from a single control station.”  Canada’s aviation administration hasn’t yet fully authorized the new firefighting approach,  largely because it needs to implement new regulations for drone fleet operations generally, but the expected benefits from operating at scale — reduced operating costs, improved efficiency and a higher return on investment — are undeniable.

Because of the growing threat from wildfires, Canada is anxious to enhance the capabilities of its first-responders.  Last August, at the height of the annual blaze season, InDro Robotics and Spexi Geospatial were contracted to provide fire-fighting agencies in Kelowna with rapid damage assessment information based on round-the-clock thermal imaging data.  The two companies fielded small off-the-shelf drones weighing less than 250 grams that can fly close to the fireline, despite the forbidding heat.  The same specialized drones are conducting night-time thermal missions over Kelowna’s main landfill to identify hidden hot-spots and toxic emission sources as fires burn beneath the surface.

InDro Robotics has deep expertise in aerial and ground robotics and a long history of working with first-responders on urgent missions.  Its tiny fire-fighting drones use an app-based automated camera platform known as Spexigon that provides consistent in-flight photogrammetry to capture high-resolution standardized images to help predict a fire’s  trajectory over time, allowing first-responders to plan and adjust their operations accordingly.  The same technology could be applied to a wide range of disaster events, including hurricanes and tornadoes, and likely will be once new regulations are in place.

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