Wednesday, September 18, 2013

Falcon UAV Air Support in Colorado


Fellow AFIT-alum Chris Miser doing good stuff in the Civil UAV market. Airpower to the People!
In the wake of the recent floods in Colorado, Falcon UAV has spent the last three days providing volunteer aerial services to the Boulder County Emergency Operations Center (EOC) and the Incident Management Team (IMT). On Thursday afternoon while all National Guard aircraft were grounded due to weather Falcon UAV was proud to have been the only aircraft that was able to take flight to support the flood efforts in Lyons.
Falcon UAV Supports Colorado Flooding Until Grounded by FEMA

2 comments:

  1. Josh,

    I have read a different account on this:
    http://www.roboticstrends.com/security_defense_robotics/article/fema_stops_uavs_mapping_disaster_area_after_colorado_flood/

    do you have any insight on this ? uninformed gatekeepers ? legal reasons ?

    Igor.

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    Replies
    1. Thanks for your comment Igor. I don't have any special insight to share. Based on what has been published at FalconUAV and the IEEE article, it sounds like deconflicting airspace for the national guard helicopters was the main concern. Maybe they were being overly conservative. There are always three things to worry about: dumb, dangerous or different. I think it's pretty clear that what FalconUAV was doing was neither dumb nor dangerous, but having UAVs help out was probably enough different that the National Guard decided to ground everyone.

      UAVs for disaster response have a lot of promise. I hope state, local and federal folks are doing the hard work now with operators to make them an integrated part of future responses.

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