Officials Search for 3 Days; Drone Finds Missing Man After 20 Minutes

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Image: Sami Sarkis/Getty Images

By Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai2014-07-23 19:34:21 UTC

After three fruitless days of extensive searching by authorities, an amateur drone pilot located a missing elderly man in a mere 20 minutes.

On Sunday, David Lesh helped save Guillermo DeVenecia, an 82-year-old man who had gone missing for three days in Fitchburg, Wisconsin, last week. Search and rescue teams had been looking for him for all that time, using helicopters, search dogs, and hundreds of volunteers, according to the WMTV.

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Then Lesh, who owns a ski and snowboard outerwear company in Colorado but was in the area on vacation, volunteered to help using his drone — and found DeVenecia in 20 minutes.

"We weren't really sure what we would find or what kind of shape he would be in if we did find him... I don't think any of us expected to find him," Lesh told WMTV, the local NBC affiliate.

Lesh flew the drone across a 200-acre field where the man was believed to be and at a certain point, through the flying robot's camera, he saw him.

"As we were making the last turn to fly it, we noticed a man out in the field sort of stumbling, looking a little disoriented," Lesh said.

Arthur Holland Michel, the founder of the Center for the Study of the Drone at Bard College, said that this story proves how useful drones can be in search and rescue situations (Canadian police saved a man last year using a flying robot). And while drones are not perfect tools for search and rescue, depending on the area they have to cover, this story "may be the start of the age of the search and rescue drone."

"Amateur search and rescuers might finally have their moment. Anybody with about a thousand dollars to spare can now buy an effective aerial search and rescue tool," he told Mashable.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), however, has shown that it doesn't want companies or organizations to use Unmanned Aerial Vehicles for those purposes.

Earlier this year, the FAA sent a cease and desist letter to EquuSearch, a Texas-based company that uses UAVs for search and rescue operations, forcing the company to halt its flights. Until then, the company had been able to find 11 missing people, although they were already deceased. Last week, however, a judge struck down the letter, and the company announced it was resuming its flights.

It's safe to say we can expect more people trying to replicate what Lesh did, Michel said. And while that could lead to more people being rescued, sometimes there's also the risk of interfering with police work.

"It's good to see that search and rescue drones actually work," Michel said. "I just hope we can figure out how to take advantage of their potential in a safe, coordinated way."

For more on Mashable's coverage of unmanned aerial vehicles, check out Drone Beat.

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Topics: Drones, Search and Rescue, U.S., US & World, World