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> Maybe a high foliage environment would be a better target for directional mics / acoustics. I don't think this works as well as you might hope. When in dense
by Alupis 6y ago
> Maybe a high foliage environment would be a better target for directional mics / acoustics.
I don't think this works as well as you might hope. When in dense foliage, it's difficult to hear sounds that are not that far away. It's a fantastic noise insulator. For this reason, survival classes usually teach signalling with reflective surfaces, like mirrors, watch faces, metal object/knives, etc. If you can sweep a helicopter with a reflection several times, they'll notice and rightfully think it's man-made. Plus, you can't hear someone screaming over a helicopter anyway.
> I think the search and rescue efforts as they stand are pretty disruptive (helicopters, teams covering grids) so I don't thin this is incrementally worse.
Certainly they are, but I do think drones close to the ground would be incredibly more disruptive, and potentially dangerous to curious wildlife.
> The "unprepared skiiers" you mention are someone's child (and often someone's parent).
You are not wrong. I think I was getting at, that most rescues are unglamorous, and usually caused by sheer stupidity of the people that were lost. Boats running out of fuel because they didn't prepare properly, or the skier example of ignoring all warnings, etc. It's not often that people were prepared, and the rock beneath their feet gave-way and now they're trapped.
Yes, we have to rescue stupid people too, but I think we should weigh the external costs to the environment when doing so. We wouldn't drain a lake to find a missing person. Maybe that's not a fair comparison? I don't know... but I do know people went outdoors to experience nature, so we shouldn't destroy it trying to save people either.
I guess, in short, you can make this scheme work, but I don't think it'll add tangible benefits to rescues, and it might actually be more effort to manage and operate, which could suck resources away from actual "boots on the ground/in the sky".
- hluska 6y agoThese are good points too. I like the idea of being able to deploy drones into areas where weather/conditions expose search and rescue teams to immense personal risks. I know so little about boats or the ocean that I’m nowhere near qualified to even have an opinion. But I wonder about applications in mountain ranges where highly experienced climbers run into constantly shifting weather or unpredictable avalanche threats. At some point, search and rescue techs have to call off searches because the conditions that lead to the original disaster threaten to lead them into the very same kind of disaster. Programmatically, that’s a very difficult problem and I can see many problems with solving it in any sort of efficient way. But armed with some education about good emergency beacons and ways to make your team visible to drone rescuers, I think there’s something there. The crap part of search and rescue is that teams tend to go out to rescue anyone who needs it. There was an incident near Calgary several years ago when a man decided to go for a hike but didn’t have enough experience in the mountains to realize that getting down is significantly more difficult than climbing up. He didn’t survive that mistake and a SAR team found him without incident. But had weather conditions been any different, it’s sad to think that those skilled, loving people could have needed their own rescue while trying to find someone whose lack of experience lead to a personal disaster...