Multi-agency wildland firefighting exercise focuses on drone integration

The Oklahoma National Guard (OKNG) partnered with Southwestern Oklahoma State University, the Oklahoma Highway Patrol and Weatherford Fire Department to host a multi-agency wildland firefighting uncrewed aerial systems (UAS) integration exercise on September 25-26.

The exercise brought the OKNG, state and local agencies and private UAS companies together to develop a common operating picture, with the aim of ensuring all public safety teams have a shared view of a multi-agency response to events like wildland firefighting.

“We’re looking at how we can be a better partner to the emergency management world and help provide an architectural structure for the employment of drones to help our own agency and the agencies that we work with to safely respond to those things with all of the tools and assets that they’ve got at their availability,” Col. Shane Riley, director of military support for the OKNG said.

The two-day exercise tested the OKNG’s and public safety organisations’ ability to create and share a common operating picture among multiple drones. Each agency operating a UAS platform fed their camera feeds, location data and other information to a single incident command post where the incident commander and staff could view, coordinate and deconflict both uncrewed and conventional aircraft operations.

During one scenario, the incident command post dispatched an emergency resupply to notional firefighters on the ground. As all agencies were using the common operating picture, the command post was able to quickly and safely clear the airspace for the resupply mission.

“We can also make it safe for manned aircraft to come into the picture and do their water drops and search and rescue,” Oklahoma Highway Patrol Lt. Scott Patton, drone coordinator for the Oklahoma Department of Public Safety said. “We’re not inhibiting their [manned] operations by having a drone or a UAS up in the air, so we can mitigate those issues now and know what that’s going to look like so we can get our manned aircraft in without having an incident.”

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