My background: I'm retired military and hold a private single-engine certificate with instrument rating, along with a 107 certificate. I'm interested in starting a volunteer drone SAR organization in the Southeast United States.
I'm thinking bimonthly on a Saturday for training is realistic. Meet in a central location for everyone, choosing different terrain each month. Pilots from TN, GA, AL, MS are probably most likely, although further ones are welcome.
Drone requirements can vary widely according to situation. While sophisticated speciality larger SAR drones have their place, fast deployment of first-on-scene small drones also have their place - i.e., rising flood waters and you want to try and identify anyone in jeopardy on rooftops, treetops ..... or someone trapped on a cliff, etc.
Everyone would be encouraged to bring their own drone. Anything from a Spark up is enough for realistic training. Training would include:
- preplanning waypoint flights
- flying waypoint flights
- efficient utilization of drone resources
- Drone search techniques: i.e., Route (line), Grid, Expanding Square, Parallel Line, Creeping Line, Helix, etc.
- multiple drone searches
- techniques for searching different kinds of terrain
- multiple drone operations
- joint operations with ground search teams
- importance of solid incident onsite command structure
- equipment a drone pilot should ideally show up with on a SAR mission
- etc.
Aside from Thunderdrones, if anyone else in the southeast U.S. is interested, message me. I have a web site I'm creating, but an admin deleted the link to it (probably because they mistakenly believed it was a commercial site?) I'll send you the link if you message me.
Would like to try and kick this off on a Sat perhaps in Mar or Apr?