ADVANCED FLIGHT TECHNOLOGIES - 2014/09
Patrick Sherman <[email protected]>
Firefighting exercise seen from above
At the Roswell Flight Test Crew, one of our priorities is to demonstrate beneficial applications of FPV multirotors, especially for the public safety community. When our local fire department asked if we'd be willing to do a demonstration for them, we leapt at the chance.
We've flown with firefighters before, but this was special because the agency in question—Tualatin Valley Fire and Rescue—serves the area where we live. If I manage to set my house on fire while trying to charge a LiPo battery, these are the people who are going to show up and put it out.
There was one more factor that set this experience apart from most of our previous public-safety demonstrations: this structural firefighting exercise involved an actual residential structure rather than a hardened, reinforced-concrete "burn room" built to withstand repeated conflagrations.
The target property was a large, two-story house on a spacious lot in a suburban neighborhood. It had been acquired by Habitat for Humanity, which plans to build 16 single-family homes on the site, but demolishing the existing structure was an impediment to moving the project forward.
Volunteers equipped with crowbars and sledgehammers are no match for a ripping fire when it comes to taking down a building, so the people from Habitat for Humanity were happy to let the firefighters practice on the structure.
A View From Above
We set up our ground station in one corner of the lot, near the incident commander's vehicle. The firefighters provided a large-screen television that we connected to our video receiver so the incident commander (the "IC" on the fire ground) and others could watch our live feed without putting on goggles.
When firefighters get the opportunity to train with live fire in a real structure, they don't simply throw a couple of burning road flares through the front door and wait. Instead, individual rooms are loaded with fuel—wooden shipping pallets and hay—and torched one at a time so trainees can watch how the fire behaves before "knocking it down" or partially extinguishing it so another group can watch it build back up again. Eventually the fire is put out for good and the training moves on to the next room.
It's a carefully choreographed series of maneuvers that resembles operations at a real fire. On the day of this exercise, four groups of new recruits took turns filling different roles:
- Attack team: observed the fire and knocked it down.
- Backup team: stood by to assist the attack team.
- Rapid-intervention team: prepared to rescue firefighters who become trapped or cut off within the burning building.
- Rehab team: where firefighters recuperate and undergo a quick medical checkup before returning to the line.
During this initial phase, we sent our FPV hexacopter—the RQCX-3 Raven—to hover above the building, relying primarily on our forward-looking infrared (FLIR) thermal-imaging camera. The boarded-up windows of each room turned white on the FLIR as the fire inside took hold. Using an onboard camera switch, we occasionally changed over to our GoPro to watch the scene in visible light.
In the midst of these training evolutions, Chris Hamilton—the fire department member who had originally reached out to us—stopped by and told us that the IC had been watching from inside his truck and requested more visible-light imagery.
"He knows that the fire is hot," Chris explained. "What your drone is giving him is the opportunity to see where all of his people are, and that's what is most important in this case, because he's responsible for keeping them safe."
Burnin' Down the House
Pleased that our efforts might be providing more than a theoretical benefit to the brave men and women running into a burning building a few dozen yards from our perch, we sent Raven out on sortie after sortie. Back on the ground, we used a pair of Hyperion EOS 07201 Super Duo Dual battery chargers to keep our reserve of LiPo batteries at peak capacity.
As the exercise progressed, we occasionally saw tongues of flame poke through the roof shingles or escape around the edges of a window. The FLIR revealed heat building inside the structure, and we anticipated that what firefighters refer to as the "terminal burn" would soon commence.
With the training inside the building complete, the firefighters pulled out and established a defensive perimeter, protecting their apparatus and adjacent property with fans of water meant to subdue, but not extinguish, the blaze.
Between flights, Chris stopped by our ground station again, this time carrying a bright-yellow Motorola radio like the one he wore in a pocket on the front of his vest.
"The IC wanted me to give you this," he said. "Listen for the call sign 'Drone Group.' He's going to request you provide him with specific views around different sides of the building."
This was a moment we had been waiting for—integrating our sUAS directly into the command-and-control structure of a local fire department. I took the radio from Chris and tucked it into a pouch on the front of my vest.
He explained how firefighters quickly identify the sides of a building during an emergency response. The side where the first unit arrives is designated Alpha, and the other three sides are referred to as Bravo, Charlie, and Delta, moving clockwise around the structure from an overhead vantage point.
Imbued with an even more heady sense of potential and responsibility, we waited to hear our call sign on the radio. We didn't have long to wait.
Air Time
"IC to Drone Group," crackled the Motorola.
Suddenly flustered, I tried to remember the advice we'd been given while earning our ham radio licenses: speak past the face of the handset, talk slowly, and don't shout.
"Go for Drone Group," I replied, hoping I had found the transmit button.
"Can you give me a look at the Charlie side of the building?" the IC asked.
"Understood, Charlie side," I answered. "Prepping aircraft for launch. Anticipate on station in two minutes."
A freshly charged LiPo pack slung beneath its belly, Raven leapt into the air and pitched forward, heading toward the far side of the structure.
In position, the aircraft executed a pirouette and settled into a hover, providing a commanding view of the inferno below and the firefighters arrayed against it.
At the conclusion of the exercise, IC Battalion Chief Scott Steiner gave us his impression of the model's effectiveness.
"The drone was very, very stable. I was actually surprised at the stability of the picture that we were able to get," he said. "The clarity on the camera was remarkable, and being able to switch from thermal to a visible-light image was valuable as well.
"I was surprised how quickly the drone could be deployed and get over to the Charlie side to give me real-time information about what's happening right now."
Sources
- Roswell Flight Test Crew
- www.roswellflighttestcrew.com
Transcribed from original scans by AI. Minor OCR errors may remain.
