How emergency services in Australia are using drones to save lives

Avy is not alone. Around the world and here in Australia, emergency services are increasingly using drones because of their many advantages over larger aircraft. Unmanned aircraft can be dispatched quicker, are small enough to fly into the nooks and crannies difficult to otherwise reach, are cheap enough to be used in the poorest countries and are clearly far safer than sending a crewed aircraft into a dangerous situation such as a fire-damaged building. All this is just the beginning, though, as innovative companies find ways to do things previously not even possible.

It didn’t take long, for instance, for Avy to adapt its sea rescue drones to spot wildfires soon after ignition – before these grew out of hand. They discovered that in the early morning, the heat cameras worked best, but later in the day, when temperatures rose, the regular lens could detect the tiny smoke columns. “It’s interesting because you wouldn’t be able to recognise them with your bare eyes,” says Zaman, “but you can when you add in our algorithm.” Avy’s drones often come out on top when pitted against human-crewed aircraft. In one forest, Zaman tells me, authorities would patrol woodland with three people in an aircraft – one pilot and two with binoculars. “Obviously, we were a lot cheaper, but our rate of detection was also 80 per cent higher.”

The possibilities have not gone unnoticed by the Australasian Fire and Emergency Service Authorities Council. Deb Sparkes, the organisation’s head of innovation, tells me she’s set up working groups to bring together chief remote pilots and agencies, as well as helping innovative companies navigate the minefield of complicated CASA regulations. “After the Black Summer and Royal Commission, the Australian Association of Unmanned Vehicles talked about using RPAS in bushfire detection and suppression,” says Sparkes. “So, the National Aerial Firefighting Center (NAFC) put these programs together to look at what the current and potential uses were for our agencies and ask how could we lift that capability?”

Currently, Victoria, South Australia, NSW and Queensland use drones for their firefighting response, with even off-the-shelf devices providing a considerable advantage. “In a factory fire, an RPAS can use thermal imagery to detect hotspots so you can direct your efforts there. For search and rescue, we can throw a drone off a cliff to look for someone, rather than sending someone down on a rope.” With technology advancing at such a rapid rate, though, increasingly, the challenge is persuading sceptical boots on the ground to embrace new ways of working while also making techies understand the practical realities of the job.

“We have a lot of manufacturers come to us and say, ‘This will be really good,’ but we’re like, ‘Well, you think it’s perfect for us, but you don’t really know how we operate.’ At this one workshop, for example, we had a guy show us how he was controlling a drone in Newcastle from his phone here in Melbourne. Everyone’s like, ‘Oh, wouldn’t it be great if we could put a drone on top of every fire truck and launch them from a control centre?’ They’re thinking ahead, but there’s just this mismatch between the agencies who are out there protecting communities and the innovators. A lot of work needs to be done to connect the two.”

Queensland’s Fire and Emergency Services is one such state dipping its toes in the water of using drones day-to-day. The department currently has 50 pilots using around 70 drones strategically scattered around. Superintendent Martin Gibson, who oversees air operations, says they’re mainly used as an extra pair of eyes. “We’ve had varied success in identifying where people are but also, where people aren’t,” he says. In particular, these are helpful being sent into house fires still burning, or afterwards when the structure could still be dangerous.

The big snag, right now at least, is that they’re still limited to using drones within the range of the pilot’s field of view – known as within visual line of sight. “Pilots have to position themselves so they can see the device the whole time. This can be a potential hazard to the crews on the ground, especially if the fire is coming towards them. Whereas a conventional aircraft is much higher up and can get itself out of trouble reasonably quickly. We’re trying to integrate drones as another tool in the toolbox.”

In the meantime, Queensland is working on a go-between, known as “extended visual line of sight”. This allows pilots to control aircraft from a distance, so long as it can be seen by an “observer” they’re in contact with. “We don’t have approval for that just yet, but it’s a capability that we’re working on,” Gibson says. “There are a lot of innovative ideas that are being developed daily, but drones are very heavily regulated. Research into a particular concept is fantastic from an application point of view, but if we can’t get past that regulator, how can we implement it? CASA is working with the emergency services jurisdictions, and there are working groups to discuss future capabilities and changes to regulations to try and make it easier for us to do our job in the future.”

How far away are we from the holy grail of “beyond visual line of sight” (BVLOS) in Australia? Well, much closer than you’d think. CASA granted medical drone delivery firm Swoop Aero permission in December to operate BVLOS. Soon, it will be flying medicine and supplies to Goondiwindi in Queensland in collaboration with local chemists. More impressively, the devices are flown partially autonomously, with one pilot overseeing up to five from Swoop’s control centre in Port Melbourne. Co-founder Eric Peck says the milestone clearance was a result of 18 months of working with CASA, and years of pioneering the technology across Africa.

“We carry everything from simple products such as Panadol, through to COVID vaccines and medicines that need to be kept very cold,” says Peck. “We can have a turnaround time in a matter of tens of minutes. Last week, for instance, we diverted a few aircraft to fly blood to a hospital where it was needed within the hour.” And because drones don’t require roads, flight paths or heliports, it means they can fly point-to-point. A six-hour drive through the forest in central Africa is reduced to 15 minutes – with no costly petrol required.

Peck used to be a RAAF pilot flying Hercules before he met his co-founder Joshua Tepper in 2017. Tepper specialised in highly industrial automation – think giant arms on construction lines building cars – and the pair combined their knowledge to the then-fledgling world of drone delivery. One of its first projects came from the NSW government, which asked them if they could build a drone to fly a kilogram of chemotherapy medicine 100 kilometres in the Outback. “We felt the way we should be approaching that problem was by taking the 70 tonnes Hercules and using Josh’s experience to condense it down into an electric, 3D-printed aircraft. We then used software to automate all the processes that sit around aviation to make it safe.” The end result worked so well Swoop won landmark contracts to fly in the Congo, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia and Sierra Leone.

In fact, drone delivery in Australia has already been quietly taking place on an even larger scale. Google Wing drones launched commercially in Canberra and Logan, Queensland in 2019 and allow for the transport of packages that weigh less than 1.5 kilograms. They’ll fly everything from cakes to sandwiches, hammers and toothpaste to more than a dozen suburbs. They’ll even bring a flat white to your office, as well as regular residential addresses. Wing now conducts more flights in Australia than in any other country worldwide. In Logan, for instance, its record was 4,500 deliveries in a single week in early August as the city entered lockdown.

“The maturity of the technology has come of age over the last two years,” enthuses Peck. “We’ve hit this inflection point where it’s cheap enough. We’re not talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars per vehicle now so you can deploy a fleet into a supply chain at a price that makes sense. A lot of the early hype surrounding the technology has moved on and we’re seeing mature operators such as Google and Swoop enter the market.”

In the distant future, the possibilities really do seem endless for affordable drones. Couldn’t, say, the devices theoretically be scattered across Australia’s bush to rapidly extinguish bushfires shortly after ignition? “Yes absolutely. Except there’s this little thing called money,” jokes the AFAC’s Sparkes. “It’s a giant leap forward to think about these sort of stratospheric drones that are up there 24/7 monitoring large areas for detection. I’m not saying it can’t be done, but it’s a huge investment.”

Not that such issues have deterred Avy. In November 2021, it began its transition away from traditional drone pilots to a “drone response network”, which sees autonomous devices launch from docking stations that can be linked together. “If you have something that you can deploy really quick, and it’s able to cover a long distance, then you have the perfect tool to help out emergency services,” says Zaman. Just two hubs linked together could cover an area as large as 1,000km2, with the aircraft able to be dispatched in minutes. Add in whole swathes of nodes, and anywhere in our continent could be within minutes of help.

We’ll leave the last word to Swoop’s Peck. His business employs 56 staff and is on course to serve up to 100 million people by the end of 2025. “That’s what we’re tracking to do,” he insists. “But by the end of next year, we’ll be asking how we can make the service accessible to a billion people by the end of the decade.”