I came across a local story about a man who went missing after the inflatable raft he was fishing in deflated.
The Coast Guard launched a search mission to find him and sent a 29-foot response boat from its Rio Vista station and an MH-65 Dolphin helicopter from its Air Station San Francisco. As of the time of writing, he had not yet been found.
Naturally, upon reading this story I thought about how a drone could have been deployed by the Coast Guard to assist in the search instead of the helicopter. However, the news organization that covered the story, the East Bay Times, could have also used a drone to enhance its reporting by getting aerial footage of the response boat over the water and capturing footage of the area where the man was fishing.
The incident occurred in Discovery Bay, which is a community in Contra Costa County surrounded by the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. As far as I know, the area is well outside the boundaries of any of the Bay Area’s international airports, so I don’t think that airspace rules would prohibit flying a drone there; though there may be other laws prohibiting them from being flown, which could also explain why the Coast Guard didn’t use one. But, I would think that an emergency situation of this nature would be an exception to any such laws.
If I could field test this idea, Ideally I would fly a drone over the delta and capture various images from different points and then compare them with similar images taken from a helicopter in an effort to prove the hypothesis that drones are not only less expensive than helicopters, but capture better quality footage.
CiCi Says 