Drone Advantages


There are practical reasons to assign SAR search duties to drones. Drones require less expertise to fly than helicopters. They can be dispatched from the ground within minutes of a search being launched, although wider searches do require more sophisticated drones with beyond-visual-line-of-sight (BVLOS) capabilities, range, and more authorizations. Drones can usually get to the search area quickly, while helicopter deployments may take longer for crews to arrive at base and prepare the aircraft before an aerial search can begin.


That’s not all. Drones that have been designed for long flight times can stay aloft much longer than crewed helicopters, and do so in extreme weather conditions that put human pilots at risk. This allows them to loiter overhead for hours at a time, or fly extended grid patterns that could exhaust a helicopter’s fuel supply.


In the case of Leonardo’s AWHero drone, “depending on the payload you can reach up to five hours of endurance,” Pretolani said. “In addition to that, the capability of this 200-kilogram class allows you to put a suite of sensors onboard, such as 8-inch EO/IR together with Leonardo’s Gabbiano


TS20 Ultra-Light maritime radar for wide-area all-weather coverage. Performance of this payload suite is comparable to what you would find on crewed helicopters.”


Being able to fly in extreme weather doesn’t mean that drones are tougher than helicopters, however; they’re just more expendable. No one is at risk of injury/death when the drones crash, and they’re cheaper to replace than helicopters.


In some cases, the remote ruggedness of the search territory requires super-small


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July/Aug 2024


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