Every year, forest fires bring destruction, injury, and even death. The ability of forest fire incident managers to control fires quickly, thereby limiting the damage, is to a great extent dependent on their ability to gather information, to deploy resources, and to perform emergency evacuations efficiently.
The MALAT Division of Israel Aircraft Industries, using mature Remotely Operated Air Vehicle (ROA) (or Unmanned Air Vehicle [UAV]) technology, has developed the application described herein, which provides real-time information to fire management, greatly enhancing the ability to manage resources. The application also provide fire fighters alerts, emergency communications relay, and other features beneficial for improvement of cost effective and safe fire suppression.
Needs
Fire management decisions rely primarily on fire scenario information. Several factors serve to limit the ability of the incident manager to gain relevant information:
- Smoke over the fire area interferes with the ability to obtain comprehensive fire intelligence.
- The incident commander, in many cases, must personally fly over the fire area, thus leaving his management post.
- Using manned aircraft for flights over the fire area has certain limitations. Night flights are undesired for safety reasons, flight time is limited, and in-smoke flights are hazardous. Due to the consequent lack of information decisions are sometimes based on outdated information.
- Serious situations on the fire line often develop rapidly with very little prior notice. This makes it difficult to mobilize current intelligence gathering technology to assist the manager in making the necessary decisions in a timely manner.
- The quality of radio communications with fire fighting forces is sometimes very poor, especially in mountainous areas.
Furthermore, the safety and well being of all fire suppression resources on the fire line, as well as their ability to effectively battle the fire, depend on radio communications, contact with immediate supervisors, knowledge of their actual location on the fire line, and prediction of fire behavior. Using the currently available resources, radio communications are sometimes of poor quality, the contact with supervisors is hindered, knowledge of location is sometimes outdated, and the means to accurately predict fire behavior are limited.
Capabilities
The system which has been successfully demonstrated in Missoula, Montana, U.S.A., in October 1996, and is capable of the following:
- Continuous real-time TV and FLIR (forward-looking Infrared) imagery of fire scenario, down-linked to the fire control center (day or night)
- Fire front line and hot spots overlaid on either a digital map or a smoke free pre-prepared aerial or satellite photo map (ortho-photo) enabling the incident commander to see the forest, houses, roads, railroads, etc.
- Print out of the fire map issued in real time
- Location of fire fighting forces overlaid on the same map or ortho-photo. This capability includes the display of fire-fighter's emergency situation stress alarms (SOS) and their location coordinates.
- The display of direction and speed of wind (at the ROA/UAV flight level) and alarms about significant changes in wind direction and speed.
- The ability to identify (using the IR image) the location where retardants have been applied. By simply clicking his mouse on the digital map, the system automatically provides the next "drop" location coordinates.
- The ability to easily transfer (to any desired location) a full fire scenario image by modem.
- Spotting distance and burnt area calculations.
- Provide a map of fire intensity using different transparent colour shades on the fire map.
- Computation and designation of the speed at which the fire front line is progressing in the various perimeter locations, including prediction of the front line location for various periods (30 minutes, 1 hour, etc.), and prediction of the time it will take to reach a particular location.
- Continuous monitoring of fire fighting resources and fire behavior to provide alerts of dangerous blow-up conditions on the fire line and potential entrapment of fire fighters.
- Through integration of a terrain-passability software module, the fire manager can determine the optimal routes for the fire fighters and the time required for withdrawal of forces.
- Monitoring of two adjacent incidents by two ROA/UAVs simultaneously.
- Emergency airborne radio communications relay.
- In addition, the system includes the capability to function in a detection mode of operation, for early warning and suppression.
Fig.1. The Firebird 2001 during test flights in 1996
Prototype Capabilities and Features
The Civilian ROA/UAV System is structured to accept any of IAI/MALAT's airborne platforms. Nevertheless, the two platforms especially suitable for civil applications and budgets are:
- The Firebird 2001, a compact, low weight configuration, flight testing completed in October 1996, and
- The Heron, a long endurance, long range configuration capable of carrying a heavy payload with a demonstrated endurance of 52 straight flight hours.
Both configurations share the same avionics, briefly described below.
The FIREBIRD 2001 (Compact) configuration: