Why don’t we leverage the pinpoint accuracy of intelligent guidance systems and the safety of unmanned aerial vehicles to fight forest fires by dropping water and/or retardant?
In: Technology
The unmanned aerial vehicles in use today is designed to deliver a relatively small payload of just a few tens of kilos of explosives. But forest fires tends to spread beyond the extinguishing capability of this little water in just a manner of seconds. It may be possible to carry more water if instead of dropping guided bombs and rockets to deliver the payload the aircraft could drop only water. However these aircraft rely on their guided bombs for the precision and are designed to fly high above the terrain where they would be unable to hit anything. Especially as the wind around the mountains and generated by the fire will be enough to blow the water far off target. This is why firefighting aircraft fly extremely low as this is the only way to reliably hit the fire. But the wind is too complex and can change too quickly for even the best autopilot systems we have.
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