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Comment by cudgy | Hacker News Reader

Seems like a good role for a drone rescue ship that targets the EPIRB location.

Unfortunately drone companies have a habit of pivoting into defence before realising their initial civil intentions.

And how fast is this drone ship? I bet slower than the helicopter. And how do you get people onboard? A drone with a robotic arm? Will it be like the claw game, but with wounded people being clawed up?

Even the longest ranged helicopters are WELL short of "middle of the ocean" range. The longest top out around 600 miles, and that's straight line, not out and back, and certainly not with any loiter time in the middle.

The Navy has helicopters that can do in-flight refueling. If an aircraft carrier is close enough it might be called upon (1).

But if not, this is what they do:

> the plane’s crew dropping a bundle of medical gear into the water near the ship, and then four pararescuemen from the 131st Rescue Squadron jumping out themselves. Once in the water, they swam to the Franz, boarding it and treating the fisherman.

https://taskandpurpose.com/news/air-national-guard-parachute...

(1) https://www.aero-news.net/index.cfm?do=main.textpost&id=88E4...

Ya, there are way more options. A few helos can refuel in-air, but more common is refueling from ships (landing or hovering) and oil rigs. Then there are a whole bunch of helicopters on navy ships that will rescue people if asked.

There are also parachute SAR techs. They will jump out of fixed-wing aircraft with ranges of 1000s of miles. They cannot get you home, but might keep you alive. (Brave people, jumping into situations where they know rescue could be days away.)

Helos on navy ships are the drop-dead last resort because, after them, there is nobody else to call. If they go down, the next wave of help will be days away.

In 1934 the airship USS Macon could carry five Sparrowhawk biplanes, and its commander wanted to convince the navy that it was a capable search and scouting vehicle because it had so much longer flying range than any aircraft of the time, it could float over the ocean and refuel and dispatch the biplanes to spread out and cover lots of area quickly.

USS Houston was carrying President Roosevelt from Panama to Hawaii on a secret route, and the airship commander launched an unauthorised scouting mission to search for his ship, found it, and dropped a bundle of current newspapers and magazines for him.

Claw "game" (scam) machines have deliberately-weak grasps, designed to drop the item they've grabbed whenever the arm is jolted — and then it's jolted at least once, usually twice, in the process of bringing it to the output bin. They are designed to drop their packages, so that people will feed in more money.

I'm not saying a drone with a claw arm would be the right design. But if it turned out that that was the right design, it would be designed not to drop its "packages", as opposed to the claw machines where dropping the package is the intended result.

> And how do you get people onboard? A drone with a robotic arm?

Nets. Nets are how you get people on board in basically all emergency scenarios.

Not that drone rescue ships seem like a particularly good idea, mind you.

No, they use harnesses or baskets. And there’s a rescue swimmer to make it less likely that you die.

https://youtu.be/1B1dnSf6rPk is one example but there are plenty videos of these guys (heroes).

I think you're forgetting that this is a drone boat, so it wouldn't have anybody onboard.

For rescuing small numbers of people from a helicopter, yes. If you have a large number of people in the water, and you are rescuing from a surface vessel, you would likely deploy netting (at the very least as backup)

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