Unmanned Aerial Vehicles in Fire Protection.
Wildfires affect 67M hectares (ha) worldwide per year, approximately 1.7 % of the land area, and costs over €2,000B per year globally - considering both firefighting and economic damage. The social and environmental costs include the damage to human health and fatalities (estimated at 340,000 pr...
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| Main Authors: | , , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
2019
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/oaiart?codigo=7387175 |
| Source: | Revista Europea de Derecho de la Navegación Marítima y Aeronáutica, ISSN 1130-2127, Nº 36, 2019, pags. 39-62 |
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| Summary: |
Wildfires affect 67M hectares (ha) worldwide per year, approximately
1.7 % of the land area, and costs over €2,000B per year globally - considering
both firefighting and economic damage. The social and environmental costs
include the damage to human health and fatalities (estimated at 340,000
premature deaths per year due to fire), release of greenhouse gases and
damage to infrastructures. Extinguishing a wildfire is an extremely complex
task. Current alternatives to fight wildfires include helicopters, hydroplanes, and
firefighters. Unfortunately, all these options have several limitations. It is
significant that they put human lives at risk. Meanwhile, price and operation
costs of aerial means are huge paint points for owners and operators. Another
important challenge is that current firefighting civil aviation regulations only
allow firefighting manned aircrafts to operate between first and last light due to
safety concerns for pilots, limiting the operation time to an average of 12 hours,
which leads to many fires reactivating at night. Also, distance from which the
water must be released using hydroplanes or helicopters is too far and, as such,
the fire extinguishing efficiency is low and the water usage results too high.
Unmanned aircrafts, also referred as drones, have the potential to overcome
these drawbacks, as no lives would be put at risks even during night operations
and offering the possibility to fly at low altitudes to improve effectiveness.
However, nowadays the use of tactical drones in fires is limited to monitoring,
surveillance and data collection tasks; while there is no single drone in the
market capable of extinguishing fires. This is because current drone
technologies lack the fire extinguishing capabilities that current firefighting aerial
means have. |
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