Drones are already used in mountain rescue operations as an aid to mountain rescue teams in circumstances like looking over the edge of a cliff, providing extra height when viewing vast open moorland or when searching in reservoirs and lakes so that a separate water team doesn’t have to be deployed.

 

There were 2,110 deployments in England and Wales in 2017 with 773 of those call-outs requiring assistance to an injured person, of those 31 ending in fatalities. 19,946 hours out of the 97,208 hours in which the volunteers operated were just for searching.

 

Scottish mountain rescue estimates that each deployment costs around £2,500 of which £1,500 is donated by the public, £500 from the Scottish government and £500 by the volunteer team members themselves.

 

Mountain rescue Scotland have even set up a charity for the sole use of developing drone use in mountain rescue operations called Search and Rescue Aerial Association. On one callout two pilots provided over 20 hours of volunteer time and almost 3.5 hours of actual flying time. One of the drones that this charity uses is the DJIEnterprise Mavic Enterprise Advanced with a thermal camera which costs £2,297 and needs to be operated by a fully CAA licensed pilot.

 

Other drones that have been used already in mountain rescue searches include the Parrot anafi which costs £691.67 and needs a pilot, and the DJI Inspire 2 costing £3,059 which again needs a pilot.

 

In 2017, 65 people were rescued using drones worldwide. In 2018 this had been upped to 133 and in 2019 it was 279. With the fundamental principle of search and rescue assignments being that the more time teams can spend rescuing rather than searching, then the better their resources are deployed, it looks as if drones are the future.