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Comment by flexd | Hacker News Reader

A more appropriate and less sensationalist title would be "Man on holiday uses his remote controlled quad-copter to search for missing man", or "Man with remote controlled helicopter got lucky, found missing man after just 20 minutes because he searched in the right place".

The 'drone' is not the news here, he could have been flying around in a helicopter, if he looked in the same place he would have found him.

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If by 'drone' you mean 'unmanned multirotor', it's actually quite an accurate topic. What's more, it provides more insight into why this is actually a big deal in modern society.

A 'drone' is a cheap and effective way to have a camera with a huge field of view operating in areas that humans and helicopters cannot, or just doing things that it would be prohibitively expensive to do otherwise.

You can fly a 'drone' over a river, where a human would be hard pressed to follow, and you can fly a drone amongst trees where helicopters could not fly. You can do both of these things cheaply, and in a far more scalable fashion. 'Drones' don't need roads or other such infrastructure, and can carry decent sized payloads practically anywhere.

The application of 'drones' has huge impact on a large number of areas of applications, and it would be silly not to recognise that.

Somewhat sensationalist it may be, but in my opinion the advent of these things is worth it.

Exactly

Flying a drone is much easier and cheaper than flying a helicopter.

Sure, you can go ride a chopper to look for the person, it's about $500 an hour

Not to mention risk and hard to reach places.

So in this case, that's $167.

Add coming and going from its base to the search area, planning the search (flight plan), etc

It's not "hop in and fly" usually

Yeah, the startup costs of helicopters are large. A Marine quartermaster once told me that it costs $N,000 just to turn a military helicopter on, because after you turn it off you have to do a bunch of maintenance tasks no matter what. And chopper technicians aren't cheap.

I completely agree that mass surveillance is and will be a problem, and drones like that might very well be a part of the problem in the future.

But the 'drone' in this case did not do anything. It is a remote controlled vehicle, and it did not do any thinking, the operator did.

The title implies the drone was the key element in finding him, and not the person controlling the drone. I agree that drones will make surveillance easier, but until they fly autonomously without human control then it is a much smaller problem.

Using drones to find missing people is a good usage case though, and I like that.

> The title implies the drone was the key element in finding him, and not the person controlling the drone.

In a sense, that is accurate. The person alone would likely have taken far longer to find the person, so the drone was a key (if not the key) element in finding the missing person so fast.

Helicopters are really expensive, and require a lot of manpower.

>"Had we had not seen him then, the drone would have seen him a few minutes later since he was in the search area we were given to look at. If nothing else, the drone helped us cover a huge area in a short amount of time that would have taken many volunteers hours to search."

I think that the cheap and quick aspects of drones are really important here.

This. Exactly this is why it's significant.

Even a small piston powered Robin helo is around $500 to operate per hour[1], and the smallest turbine powered ones are going to be around that figure just for the fuel: ~500 lb/h fuel consumption [2][3], JetA at > $6 / gallon [4].

So for one hour helo ops, you can purchase 2-3 parrot drones [5].

[1] http://www.aneclecticmind.com/2013/09/12/why-i-charge-545hou...

[2] http://www.turbokart.com/about_arrius.htm

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurocopter_Colibri

[4] http://www2.jetaviation.com/index.php/jet/bedford/fuel

[5] http://www.amazon.com/Parrot-AR-Drone-Quadricopter-Controlle...

But you need to factor efficiency into that. If the top speed of the chopper is 100mph, versus 10mph for the drone. Then you can cover a much larger area quickly, furthermore a helicopter can stay up longer and has much greater range. So it's not enough to say a heli costs x/per hour therefore drones. Kind of like saying trash trucks are expensive, therefore we should replace them with wheel barrows.

From the article: We were asked to search a large area of farmland with the drone. I covered three-quarters of it using three batteries, and the last quarter was a little too far for me to get good first-person view reception

Landing to change batteries every couple of minutes, is a serious blow to efficiency.

This is exactly what's wrong with most of today's news. Sensationalism is taking the focus away from what matters[1].

But I'm not sure if the drone is not the news here. I think a drone can be a cheap way to search from above. Instead of using a helicopter multiple drones could be used saving costs and covering a larger area.

[1] Read 'Avoid News'.

I wonder why the story is sensationalized and hyped up so much in the first place, and who stands to gain from it?

Currently there is a big argument between us UAS hobbyists and the fed over our rights to fly our model aircraft. Search and Rescue has been deemed by the FAA to be commercial use and disallowed unless the pilot and aircraft are certified which is nearly impossible and very expensive. Just recently a judge has ruled that the FAA does not have enforcement powers over this use but it continues to go after such use throwing it's weight around, possibly at the cost of human life.

people with the ability to immediately fly a drone > people with the ability to immediately fly a helicopter. The drone/rc/quadrocopter IS the news. The fact that one guy put a camera in the sky is news.

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