Utah Climber Rescued From Remote Cliff With Assistance of Drone and Helicopter

The search and rescue team launched a drone to identify the man’s location and relayed to DPS helicopter crews to hoist him from the cliff. (Uintah County Sheriff’s Office)

Fox News May 25, 2020

A Utah climber who fell and cracked his head while scaling a cliff by himself on Sunday was rescued after he regained consciousness, and nearby campers heard his cries for help, authorities said.

The 52-year-old man, whose name has not been released, was climbing up a slot in the cliff near Jones Hole National Fish Hatchery, by the Colorado border, when he fell an unknown distance, the Uintah County Sheriff’s Office said. He told rescuers he didn’t know how long he was unconscious before he awoke and yelled for help.

The group of campers, which included a member of the sheriff’s search and rescue team, heard the stranded man’s calls. They were unable to pinpoint the man’s location because his cries echoed off the cliff walls. They called authorities around 1:40 p.m., setting off a five-hour rescue operation.

"The area he was climbing in is out of the way. You wouldn't really expect someone to be climbing there," Sheriff's Sgt. Dustin Cheshire said. "If it hadn't been for the camping group with a Wasatch County search and rescue member who heard this guy yelling and screaming, it's unlikely anyone would have found him."

The sheriff’s office sent a search and rescue team and requested helicopter crews from both the Utah Department of Public Safety (DPS) and Classic Air Medical.

The Classic Air Medical crew spotted the man after arriving, but the steep terrain prevented them from reaching him, the sheriff’s office said.

The search and rescue team launched a drone to identify the man’s location and told the DPS helicopter crew. The DPS crew was able to reach the man and hoist him from the cliff.

Drone and Ropes Help Rescue Drivers Trapped in River

Well done firefighters, It’s good to see positive use of drone.



May 18, 2020
Firefighters use a drone and ropes to rescue drivers trapped in river due to sudden water rise in Zhangjiajie, China.

Loc8 Software Helping Find Missing Persons with a Drone / UAS – Another Tool in the Toolbox

As a follow on to our blog post Drones for Search and Rescue (SAR) – Another Tool in The Toolbox,  where we discussed how incredibly useful drones are.  A search and rescue drone used by emergency services, such as police, firefighters or volunteer rescue teams, is ideal for searching over vast areas for missing persons and crime victims in need of rescue and in any environment.  Search times can be significantly reduced while limiting potential risk to the party being rescued as well as rescuers.

In 2018 DJI reported that 133 people around the world were rescued after being found with drones.  Also, of note is that 2018 marked a new milestone in public safety drone use, as four people were rescued by drones in three separate incidents on two continents on a single day.  

These numbers are undoubtedly higher as more search and rescue organizations discover the benefits of drones.  While many search and rescue drones are outfitted with infrared or thermal and high-resolution cameras to help assist in finding missing people.  This is not always the case.  Many of times, Searcher use their drones with their regular cameras to take aerial photos of a large area where people are reported missing or lost.

This is where the challenge begins, how do you search, sift or squint through often hundreds and hundreds of aerial photos looking for the missing individual(s)?

According to Gene Robinson. “The squinting process is where searchers comb through photos one at a time for any details that might point to recently disturbed earth or a walking trail, and for the colors of the clothes the missing person was last seen wearing. Different colors and textures represent potential clues that could lead to a recovery. A speck of blue on the screen points to a color that is rarely found in nature, and in Texas, when people go missing near ranch land, blue is often the color of the jeans they're last seen wearing.”   A SAR study shows humans are only capable of spotting a target 30% of the time when reviewing digital images.

Loc8’s software image scanning process can dramatically increase your success rate in finding your target!  Loc8 is a software solution that empowers search and rescue agencies and emergency responders to quickly scan images from aerial drone footage to locate missing people or objects by using image scanning technology that isolates specific pixel clusters.  Loc8 can go through thousands of images, much faster than is humanly possible, to locate specific color values that might represent blue in the missing persons jeans.  Once Loc8 identifies a target in an individual image it will circle it in red for quick and easy identification by the searcher.

The final product includes a map with an aerial view and a quality report that is produced with mission specific data with Latitude and Longitude coordinates of the image.  This can be passed on to searchers in the field to locate the target.

Loc8’s software is a very exciting advancement in search and rescue that I have now utilized on training and actual searches and may help your SAR team find missing persons faster.  Loc8’s software should be - another tool in the toolbox!

Hollywood Drone Operators Win Recognition as Cinematographers in Arbitration

International Cinematography Guild and Drone Operators celebrate victory over Warner Bros. in arbitration

Many drone operators consider themselves to be cinematographers or photographers. An arbitrator in a Hollywood labor dispute has agreed, granting drone cinematographers on a motion picture or film the same rights as other cinematography professionals.

Hollywood Reporter April 29, 2020

Five individuals working on a TV show should have been covered under an agreement between cinematographers and producers, an arbitrator ruled April 21.

Thanks to COVID-19, many are losing their jobs while others are now worried about maintaining health insurance. But one group in Hollywood may have just taken a step toward realizing employee benefits. That would be Hollywood's drone operators, who were the subject of a lengthy fight in arbitration over classification and jurisdiction.

After Warner Bros. hired drone technicians in 2015 for Rush Hour, a TV series based on the film franchise, the International Cinematographers Guild initiated arbitration in an attempt to get them health and pension benefits afforded to employees under its collectively bargained agreement with producers.

On Friday, near the end of a virtual meeting with its members about COVID-19, the guild shared "good news," that the arbitrator had largely ruled in its favor.

ICG insisted its labor agreement covered those who worked in "all phases of motion and still picture photography,” including members of a drone crew, who they asserted should be afforded the same treatment as aerial directors of photography, camera operators and camera technicians. They argued that drone technicians make similar creative decisions regarding camera placement and shot execution.

Warner Bros. saw these individuals closer to helicopter pilots who haven't been traditionally covered under the ICG agreement. The studio further told the arbitrator that drone technicians were really subcontractors, and any decision holding otherwise could mean WB is acting as an unlicensed drone operator. That could raise trouble with the Federal Aviation Administration.

According to ICG, the arbitrator found April 21 that Warner Bros. should have covered five members of the drone crews working on Rush Hour under the terms of the guild's basic agreement. One drone pilot was not covered, the arbitrator ruled, because he piloted the drone while an operator worked the camera and, unlike another drone pilot, did not exercise artistic skill in operating the drone.   

ICG further shared with its members, "The arbitrator found that the employer had the burden to prove that it was subcontracting for work that was not covered by the Local 600 Basic Agreement, and that Warner Bros. did not meet that standard. "

The arbitrator's award is said to not be final with damages still yet to be determined.

Because the Rush Hour case was in arbitration and given the fact-dependent nature of these types of disputes, the legal precedent may be limited for now. Nevertheless, with the possibility of settlement and more claims against studios to come, the ranks of people calling themselves cinematographers could be one of the few occupations growing at this difficult economic time.

Drones: Incident Response & Decision-Making

A good read, Where Wayne Baker emphasizes that the use of drones for emergency incidents must be balanced with proven human methods.

Standard aerial imagery from drones enhances scene size-up, and thermal aerial imagery helps to improve searches and to mitigate risks to firefighters. That said, the technology shouldn't replace ground-level strategies and tactics.

Firehouse.com  Wayne Baker May 1, 2020

Throughout my career as a firefighter/paramedic, I trained and prepared extensively to respond to a variety of incidents. Later, as a fire chief and an emergency management coordinator, I prepared to coordinate and facilitate incident response at a broader level. 

No matter the incident or my role, having enough actionable data and information to make the right incident action plan was a challenge. I sought tools, techniques and technology that would make my crews better informed for efficient and safe operations.

For me, drone technology and its associated tools and tactics became one of the most significant advances for this information-gathering on incident response.

Although the adoption of this technology by public safety has been rapid, many questions still surround the use of drone technology in incident response and decision-making, for example: What tactics and techniques exist for utilizing drones on incidents? What tools can be used in information-gathering? How do you analyze and act upon data? Of increasing importance, how do we better maintain aircraft? Answers to these questions will continue to evolve as the technology continues to improve. Read More