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North central TX | I'm a "bonafide" drone pilot for out local vfd. I've personally done a number of missing person searches and I can tell you that they can be deceivingly difficult. Between flight times, poorly defined search areas, interference from involved people/organizations, and environmental conditions that add difficulty; its rarely as easy as flying a quick grid and spotting a person on open ground.
I've been involved in looking for fugitives both in rural country and in town, looking for lost children, and looking for lost elderly or mentally disabled pts that wandered away from home in all types of weather. We live in an area called the "Cross Timbers" and it is exactly as it sounds. There is a band of oak trees across North TX that separates zones and they literally form breaks or "cross cut" large chunks of prairie. This type of environment makes it very difficult to use a drone to search for people.
Normally the police are involved in these missing persons cases before fd and already have a "command" setup. Although they're universally poor at it, sorry officers. And will have a poorly identified "search area" that they then want to skip around in and look at high cover areas or likely areas of refuge with no real methodology. Then there's some do-gooder watching the monitor over your shoulder who thinks they see something, or asking "what's that" in the middle of the screen. Or you have volunteers out by themselves wandering aimlessly through the search area with no communication equipment and no way to verify they aren't the victim taking resources away from the actual search. Then there's weather. And wild animals bedded down that return heat signatures on a thermal camera at night, or tree or brush or terrain cover. If someone is thrown down in a little wash in a waterway, it'd be really hard to see them if they were in neutral colored clothes and the drone didn't pass just the right way over the site.
In Sac County, from my recollection of time spent there as a kid, there's not a lot of forest. Lol. That means probably scanning farmsteads and waterways with the drone quickly, then walking those areas, and grid flying the open fields. That would seem to be where a drone search would shine. | |
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Missing trucker
