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Canadian drone defies tinfoil hat wearers

by on13 May 2013



Helps people

While tin-foil hat wearers in the US are convinced that its government is building drones to drop bombs on them while they have their grits at a local diner, across the border the technology is being put to proper use.

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police in the province of Saskatchewan announced yesterday that they successfully used the small Draganflyer X4-ES helicopter drone to locate and treat an injured man whose car had flipped over in a remote, wooded area in near-freezing temperatures. Zenon Dragan, president and founder of the Draganfly company that makes the drone, said in a statement: "to our knowledge, this is the first time that a life may have been saved with the use of a small Unmanned Aerial System helicopter.

The injured driver managed to call 911 from his mobile phone, but he didn't know his location and couldn't guide emergency responders to him. A regular, manned helicopter equipped with night vision wasn’t able to find him in an initial sweep of the area. After several hours without any sign of the accident victim, they decided to try a Draganflyer drone with an infrared camera, flying it toward the last recorded location from his phone's GPS.

The drone's infrared camera picked up three heat signatures, one of which turned out to be the man, who was "curled up in a ball at the base of a tree next to snow bank". Emergency responders took him to a hospital for treatment. A handful of other police agencies in Canada and the US have previously admitted to using drones in search-and-rescue operations, there haven't been any reports of these operations finding an injured person in time to get them medical attention. The UK used a drone to arrest someone in 2010.

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