The Expanding World of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles in the Fire Service

摘要

I STARTED FLYING MODEL HELICOPTERS because I thought they looked "cool"; this was before the advent of gyro-sta-bilized platforms, and I'd never before heard the word "quadcopter." I gave up on it after about two years not because it wasn't fun but because I ran out of money and time to repair my small 250s after every flight. Needless to say, I wasn't an epic pilot.Fast forward a few years. You can now walk into a big box store and walk out with a fully global positioning system-stabilized, state-of-the-art flying camera platform for a very reasonable price. Unfortunately, walking into a store and coming out with a fully functioning aircraft that operates in the National Air Space (NAS) without so much as a test flight has led some fire and law departments to do just that.