Northwest Aerospace News February | March 2018 Issue No. 1 | Page 38

T
acAero worked with its customer,
Insitu, to get imagery of the fires this
summer. Insitu is working to expand
commercial applications of its UAVs,
and in some cases, the drones work
very well. But TacAero’s approach has
advantages, Prange said.
Standard color
image of location of
a water drop from a
helicopter.
For starters, there’s the simple fact that
TacAero has a manned aircraft—the
TopCub or sometimes a trusty Cess-
na—with a human pilot. That means
there are fewer Federal Aviation
Administration restrictions about how
and where it can fly and what types of
other aircraft it can fly around, com-
pared to a UAV.
This is the same
area as the top
picture, but in ther-
mal imaging (the
darker trees are the
ones that have cold
water on them from
the helicopter drop,
identifying where
the drop actually
occurred since you
can’t see it in the
top picture)
In some cases, TacAero’s manned
flights were able to observe helicop-
ter water drops to see how close they
were getting to the actual flames on the
ground—and live-stream that infrared
video imagery to incident commanders
on the ground.
“We could get over the
fires before the
helicopters,” Wells said.
This shows the
thermal imaging
view of the Indian
Creek Fire in July
2017 (compare to
the bottom corner
inset of the same
picture to see
what you see from
the plane - nothing
but smoke - the
thermal imagery
sees heat through
smoke layers)
And since most drones are developed
with military uses in mind, they’ve got
very specific capabilities that aren’t
always as effective in civilian use,
Prange said. Adapted military drones
can effectively track a vehicle driving
through traffic or even a person in a
crowd, but in a wildfire situation, it’s
less important for an incident com-
mander to be able to zero in on one
specific tree than it is for that com-
mander to be able to see the entire
forest. This kind of interplay of UAVs and manned aircraft—
taking advantage of the strengths of each—will only
become more common.
The same will be true over the next
couple years as forest and recreation
managers oversee the restoration of the
forest. “It’s a really exciting time to be in the industry,” Prange
said. “Aviation at large is going to be evolving far quick-
er than we can imagine. The market has spoken and
technology is pushing.”
38
NORTHWEST AEROSPACE NEWS
Devon Wells
Aviation Services
844-FLY-CUBS Ext 710
www.tacaero.com