How One Drone Service Provider Came to The Rescue After Hurricane Ian

Tampa, FL, OCT 10, 2022 – 

Drone Cadets, along with its partners Dronetech UAS, SkyHound UAS, Butler Drones, Drone Lecture, Steam Thru Drones, 3rd Eye Aerial, and others, are members of the Aerial Systems Group International (ASGI) Consortium.

To prepare students for the FAA’s Remote Unmanned Pilot Certification and various advanced drone operation (ADO) deployments, the consortium worked together to build the Career Pathways Pipeline, which offers career technical education and skill training to people interested in a career in drone technology.


Hurricane Ian provided a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for the consortium to work with the mapping software provider DroneDeploy through their crisis response initiative at DroneDeploy.org, which offers free software to nonprofit organizations and governments in disaster and crisis response.

 

One of the fortunate students who was able to use the mapping program well was Faustino “Tino” Taguja. He began by gathering more than 400 pictures of a local park, which he then sent to the DroneDeploy’s online platform, which analyzed the information in a flash. Tino set up a mapping mission on the DroneDeploy mobile app, selected a region of interest to map, collected the data, uploaded it to Drone Deploy, and within hours had a 2D and 3D map of the area.

After participating in this activity, Tino became aware of the potential of mapping a region both before and after a hurricane to undertake damage assessments or evaluate a region for the safe deployment of first responders.

 

For the past two weeks, Tino has been making the trip to Fort Myers, Florida to lend a hand with a missing persons operation for a non-profit group called “Civilian Disaster Response Organization”, 501c3. He is the operation’s primary pilot and is responsible for gathering images, videos, and new maps of the area to aid rescuers in understanding the search area. The mission is to locate retired veteran James Dennis “Denny” Rust, 72, who was last seen aboard his boat, “Good Girl,” anchored at Island Bay Marina in Ft. Myers, Florida, on September 28, 2022.

 

View all the maps and videos that were taken throughout the search if you wish to participate in finding the missing boat by assisting rescuers.

 

 Check out the latest maps here:

Map 1

Map 2

 

By Henze Gustave

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Henze Gustave

CEO, SkyHound UAS
Chief Metaverse Officer, Drone Cadets
Co-Chairman, Aerial Systems Group International (ASGI)