“There’s a surprising amount of deployments with this technology,” says Bonner. Officers can immediately identify footprints in shallow water using aerial mapping In less than half an hour Bonner and the Unmanned Special Operations team had processed an orthomosaic and inspected individual images for hazards. The Essex police’s HQ is equipped with dedicated desktop computers for data analytics, but in this exercise speed was of the essence. The images were loaded into the team’s operational laptops for field processing. The drone followed the flight path autonomously and within ten minutes had automatically landed. First, a flight path was plotted in the free flight planning app, PIX4Dcapture, then the DJI Mavic drone was launched.

The team pulled up to the river and followed real-world proceedings. Their mission sounded simple: cross a river. No training exercise can prepare a team for every eventuality, but as part of the force’s continued professional education, Perran and the Special Operations team headed to Wales. One tool used to find and rescue the missing is drone mapping with Pix4D. “In Essex in particular there’s an awful lot of mud here,” continues Bonner. Its green fields are crossed with canals and rivers, and dotted with lakes and ponds.

Essex has one of the longest coastlines in the country.

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