Has there been any sort of discussion between the fire community and the news folks regarding the tactical value of their live aerial shots?
Granted, the command staff has better things to do than channel surf the web for feeds, especially when the shots may be driven by viewer ratings and clearly lacking any sort of understanding of fire behavior and/or suppression tactics and strategy.
What if the pilots and camera crews from the news side could attain certification to operate (at AA’s discretion) safely and effectively within (or closer to) the fire ops space? Perhaps the result would be a win-win for both sides? Video of value to the decision makers, and higher ratings for the affiliate(s).
I could ramble on with the pros, cons, what ifs, and why nots, but I will leave that for others to contribute.
This is what the FIRIS program is scoped to do. However for video to to be of the greatest value IMHO it needs to be geospatially referenced video. If you have to ask “where that video is” then its just a fire. ATAK is the perfect platform for this type video to be viewed in.
@Chaparral yup nothing really new they put a cam on AA330 in 2008 with remote gimbal control. National Guard has MQ9 feed yada yada the game changer is the georeferenced video. A regular video without some obvious terrain/object association gives you some fire behavior but does not tell you where that is. AA-51 and the Cobra videos are geospatially exported but they are not live for wide access. All of this is not an issue of capability but rather adopting it. Again ATAK is THE answer for live geospatial video ingest.
During last years onslaught I recall seeing several news feeds (mostly LA area) that had very good street name overlays which gave an accurate orientation/location.
Good intel is never a bad thing, and there are plenty of good applications for this stuff like evacuation and rescues, but for our larger fires, I often wonder if technology will make much difference in the suppression outcomes.
Our aerial forces have always had ‘realtime intel’, and our Ops leaders already get this info distilled into a narrative form by highly-skilled air-attack folks, so any ‘improvements’ are largely for the benefit of the folks in the ICP on in front of screens who wish they could see the fire.
AJ has shared some good stories about live nightime IR helping flag spots and slops, but we all know when a fire wants to make a run, it’s going to run, and many times, our ability to reposition quick enough to make hay will be outstripped by the fire behavior, regardless of the freshness of the information.
@Flyron all of these use some sort of network connection. AA-51 and Cobras are using a Persistent Systems radio to send to ground. That ground node will produce a LAN/wifi to get the video from but you must have a ground node to do this.
FIRIS has the pipe to do this live over satcomms meaning no ground network required you just need connection to the worldwide web. It also has a Persistent Systems radio so if you had one on the ground you could get it right from the aircraft.
AA51 does not do live video on a regular basis. They upload the video to a server.
@pyrogeography you are spot on its not gonna put the fire out but it can better help us with decision making and reflex time when we are at a loss visually. Is that fire over the ridge? Everything is smoked out but the camera has IR and can get us the info we seek. The undetected spot, the crew calling for help on the radio in an entrapment etc. Like all things just another tool to help us out and with the improve last mile data in the field we can get the info to the branch, divs etc in the field.
We are using geospatial aerial footage from our small mavic 2 enterprise over LTE into ATAK and its a game changer for any type of incident when you cant get eyes on exactly where it is. We have a large river bottom and as you know fires in the flat jungle is really deceptive on location. We can fly, drop a point and then figure out best access. This same type of thing can be done from AA-51 FIRIS COBRA etc with the right set up. From a HELO if your low enough you can do it over LTE.