Alaska Drone Class
Alaska Drone Class
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5. Emergency Response:
5. Emergency Response:
Drones can be deployed in search and rescue operations, assisting in locating missing persons or evaluating disaster areas.
In Alaska, where harsh weather, vast wilderness, and remote communities pose serious logistical challenges, drones have become a crucial asset in emergency response efforts. They are deployed in search and rescue missions to quickly locate missing persons, assess avalanche zones, and survey disaster-stricken areas like flooded villages or wildfire zones. These operations are urgent, high-stakes, and often coordinated with public safety agencies, making them commercial or governmental in nature—requiring drone pilots to hold an FAA Part 107 certification. This certification ensures that operators understand how to safely navigate controlled airspace, coordinate with manned aircraft, and respond to emergency scenarios. The TRUST test, designed solely for recreational pilots, is not adequate for this level of responsibility. By relying on trained and certified Part 107 pilots, Alaska’s emergency responders can leverage drone technology to save lives and enhance situational awareness in some of the most challenging environments in the U.S.
Alaska's cutting-edge drone program will empower emergency responders to reach remote terrain, saving lives through the integration of aerial and geographic information systems. LearnMore Here
“Through the ARROW program, drones will be deployed in 10 key communities around the state for beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) inspections and situational awareness data gathering,” Dylan Blankenship, aviation development specialist at DOT&PF, said. “During emergencies, the drone technology will allow us to quickly assess situations, locate individuals in need and make informed decisions about resource allocation.”
When it comes to search and rescue operations, it is crucial to locate missing individuals as quickly as possible. There is little time to waste when someone’s life could be at risk. While rescue teams are wholly aware of this fact, they are quite limited in terms of their ability to find people quickly without an aerial perspective. For this reason, the use of drones for search and rescue is becoming more and more prevalent.
Search and rescue missions often consist of teams walking or driving in a straight line while looking around for missing people, but this technique only allows for a limited amount of coordination and terrain covered.
In fact, these teams may even have difficulty accessing remote or inaccessible areas safely —for example, if the terrain is rocky, hilly, has cliffs, rivers or larger bodies of water. Furthermore, there is only so much that human eyes can see or detect from a vantage point on the ground. Fortunately, drones can be used for search and rescue operations to help locate missing persons, to make it safer for rescue teams to do their job, and ultimately, to help save the lives of those in danger.
A deeper dive into search and rescue drone technology
When thermal drones are used for search and rescue missions, they use an infrared sensor to process infrared radiation, which is invisible to the human eye. The sensor processes the infrared radiation coming from an environment and turns it into an image that humans can see using color.
Thermal images look different depending on the color palettes used. The most popular color palettes for search and rescue missions are white hot and black hot. In this case, the object giving off the most heat will appear white and the object giving off the least amount of heat will be black, or it might be the other way around, and everything else will appear a different shade of gray.
The benefits of drones in search and rescue missions
The benefits of drones in search and rescue missions
There are a number of benefits in using drones for search and rescue operations, which is why drones are becoming increasingly indispensable in these missions. One of the main advantages is the enhanced aerial coverage that drones can provide, as compared to a human rescue team alone—or even a human rescue team with access to a helicopter.
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