These 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

These 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...