Comment by FireBeyond

Modern fire departments (including my own) are already using drones, and have found that the best use for them is not "how quickly can we find someone", but thermal imaging from above on structure fires.

> and do the searching so that you don't have to

The searching that we did just isn't really solved by drones (and I love them, some of my best photography is from a drone). It's things like "obscured house numbers on a street", "ambiguous address", not "person lost in a forest". Now if you want to talk about the use of drones for SAR? Absolutely. But for the vast majority of 911 "attempt to locate", getting there quickly is rarely the issue. We can get there quickly and still spend minutes figuring out that you're actually living on a flag property (where your home is behind another, but you share a driveway).