Good practice:

Drones in mountain rescue services in Bieszczady Mountains

UAS have revolutionized the work of many services including those dedicated to rescue operations. Drone services in this case are using for saving life’s of lost and injured. The basic activity of Bieszczady Mountain Volunteer Rescue Service is to help people in need in the mountains, but rescuers often take part in actions outside the mountain area, e.g. during heavy searches, mass accidents or activities using rope techniques and a helicopter. Now also drones are included as a professional equipment. This is new powerful addition to the rest of the tools used so far, which can enter easily into the difficult unreachable areas. Agility, aerial inteligence helps a lot more to gather information about searching area.
Implementing drones was the main activity in the project and it was strongly related to the project goals like establishing a training and coordination center for cross-border rescue operations ,reduction of the mobilization time of rescue teams increasing the effectiveness of cross-border rescue operations in the Bieszczady Mountains and raising the qualifications of rescuers from the crossborder area. Of course together with the purchease of the equpment (one drone with a thermal imaging camera and one searching in a daylight drone) the rescuers participated in training for drone operators (officially: unmanned aerial vehicles) with an additional authorization for out-of-sight flights for the weight category of aircraft up to 25 kg.

Implementation of the project:
equipment, trainings, workshops in the crossborder area with the budget around 500 000 EUR

Since the beginning of the introduction of drones, several effective search actions were carried out with the participation of the drone, which allowed for a significant reduction in the cost of the action, and above all, time savings. The greatest success in this case is providing professional help and finding the missing person with the usage the new technology introduced.

Unfortunately, in some cases the drone ship is not able to enter places that are obscured by mountains, rocks, forest - fast signal loss.
UAS cannot ascend as high as helicopters and are more susceptible to adverse weather conditions

This practice is potentially interesting for other foundations/rescue teams and drone usage in this case has an direct visible social impact. Mountain rescue teams operate on the base of voluntary work and they are cosindered as a non profit sector where implementing new technologies such as drones is sometimes difficult but the rapid development of UAS can be a really powerful addition to the already existed ways and tools in the mountains helping actions.