Happy Monday!
Something is happening with drones as first responders, and almost nobody outside public safety is talking about it.
Let’s look at the adoption curve. The FAA granted 976 waivers for drone-as-first-responder operations in the seven years following the program's launch in 2018. In the ten months that followed, it cleared more than a thousand additional agencies.
One year cleared seven years’ worth of growth.
Slowly… then all at once.
Chula Vista started the first program in the country. As of May, they had flown 25,000 missions. On 17,170 of those calls, the drone arrived before any ground unit. Average time on scene: ~96 seconds.
On 4,629 calls, no patrol officer had to respond at all. The drone got there, looked, and confirmed there was nothing to send anyone to.
Roughly one call in five returned to the department.
Think about the ripple effects.
Every city in this country is short on responders and tight on money. Drones are a tool that puts eyes on a scene in a minute and a half and gives you back a fifth of your call volume.
Drones are not replacing first responders - they multiply.
Sweden is an example to follow.
On July 19th, an Everdrone aircraft in Borås launched on a suspected cardiac arrest and lowered an AED by winch. It beat the ambulance. A bystander applied the pads under dispatcher direction and delivered the shock. The patient, a man in his sixties, got his pulse back at the scene. Swedish public radio reported the aircraft was deployed 15 seconds after the alert.
15 seconds from alarm to air.
Last week, I spoke with David Bigelow. A man deploying this technology in real time.
David has served for more than 20 years in his local fire and EMS departments. He’s a commercial pilot, flight instructor, and flies missions for a multi-agency program in Chesterfield County, Virginia, that went live in July. Police, fire and EMS, the sheriff’s office, and the 911 call center are all sharing the same drones, docks, and pilots.
Every flight his team makes is public record. The pilot still checks the weather and airspace before launch. David welcomes the skeptics and pulls up the transparency dashboard for them.
Bigelow shares how drones went from mainstream to infrastructure. It stopped being a gadget somebody demos at a conference and became something a community can buy, mount, and deploy.
The tech is proven. Regulators are playing catch-up.
Catch my conversation with David, then ask your fire chief if they deploy drones as first response. I’m curious to hear what they say.
Over the weekend, I connected with Ryan Chamberlain, the lead drone operator for Colorado’s North Fork Valley. Will share details as things develop.
In the meantime, watch our latest conversation below, or listen on the go.
David - thank you for joining us on Founders + Friends! The door is always open :)