DRONES The emergency services have embraced drones which are becoming an indispensable tool on the front line. Solomon N’Jie looks at the use UAVs in surveillance
PROLIFERATION OF DRONE USE IN SAFETY AND SECURITY ENVIRONMENTS
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nmanned aerial vehicles, more commonly know as drones, have received some bad press over the past year due to a number of isolated high profile incidents that impacted people’s lives. It is worth looking at how drones can positively affecting our lives and contribute to ‘Safer Cities’ and what is holding them back from being fully utilised. Drones are already used in a wide range of safety applications such as traffic management, assisting the emergency services, construction site monitoring, crowd safety and security management through to pollution and environmental hazard monitoring. The emergency services have embraced drones which are becoming an indispensable tool on the front line. Within the fire service they have the ability to detect fires and significantly improve the fire extinguishing process. They are great tools for scene monitoring, rapid 360 degrees assessment of burning structures and have the ability to see through smoke with thermal imaging cameras. The use of drone technology during an active fire can save many fire victims lives as well as those fighting the fire. Search and rescue are equipped with drones to cover wide areas of land and sea where helicopters and night vision goggles struggle to compete. When accessories such as thermal heat scan cameras are attached they increase the success rate of rescue operations. Increasingly the police use drones to actively engage in hot pursuit of criminals, particularly driving stolen vehicles. Tracking drones are hundreds of times cheaper to hire or run than a helicopter, not to mention infinitely more nimble and discrete in tracking suspects.
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COUNTER TERROR BUSINESS MAGAZINE | ISSUE 38
DRONES AND SURVEILLANCE Within the security market the British Security Industry Association estimates there are over five million network cameras in the UK, so what value do surveillance drones add to this vast video coverage? Being mobile, airborne and equipped with on-board cameras, they are capable of doing things that are impossible for regular fixed surveillance cameras, like birds-eye views over large areas or dispatching rapidly to areas of interest. Security guard tour applications offered by drones enable more rapid patrolling than human guards as well as being unimpeded by physical barriers on the ground. Once at a scene they can more readily spot, track and report the movements of an intruder, offering rapid situational awareness and removing the human guard from harm’s way. We are at a starting point of embracing drones as part of our city infrastructure with drone technology development and applications fuelled by the need to deliver services and products more rapidly and efficiently. However, increased usage with a lack of effective regulation also brings an unspecified amount of potential risks to both national security and public safety. There are regulatory considerations, when using drones for security or commercial purposes and also aviation rule enforcement, governance concerning consumer data protection and privacy which all need to be addressed. In the UK drones are well regulated, with clear guidance from the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) however, activity outside of these directives is starting to cause problems. All drones have the potential to drop out of the sky and hit people, buildings or valuable
