Great points especially about needing to actually cut trees. I've never been on a fire crew though friends and family members have been hot shots and tanker pilots.
I missed the 40 acres part, thats ludicrous. I live about a mile from the 3.6+ million selway bitterroot / frank church wilderness complex ... you would need a lot of drones just to cover the parts near towns.
I do think there would be some merit in a system that could detect a smoke plume quickly and slow them enough to give crews time to safely get there especially on days with multiple starts.
Although I agree that better detection may have some value, I have not seen anything from this company (their website or the press they link to) that indicates they actually add anything here.
A story: I was on a crew that was chasing after a series of dry lightening strikes (hundreds of strikes in a night). It was a bad scenario because the weather forecast showed hot, dry, windy weather was coming, so we were in a race against the weather to put out the ignitions. The next morning we chased after the fires, map in hand (showing the location of every lightening strike). We started with the ones in the sketchiest conditions (fuels, terrain, buildings). We put out one after another tiny fire for days. Some were single smoldering trees, some had grown to a few acres. We were lucky to get them all out just before the bad weather arrived. Our limiting factor was not the ability to detect the fires, but the ability to put them out. This is sort of typical of my limited experience. Obviously my experience is small in terms of time and geography. I would however be curious about any research that addresses the value of better detection. It may be that small improvements in detection would help a lot, or it may be insignificant. But the reason for my story is that in my (very limited) experience, detection has not been the problem.
Finally I can't talk about fire suppression without mentioning how tenuous the situation is. On the one hand, the story I told above is one where we prevented a massive fire (given the weather and fuels). But really we just kicked the can down the road. At the end of that story, the conditions were a tinderbox forest in a historically dry and dying forest. Much of the West is in record drought, summers keep getting hotter and drier, wildland-urban interface is getting worse, and fuels keep building up because of beetle kill, our "successes" in fire suppression, etc.
It's not like the fire community doesn't know. This was covered in my training. Everyone in the field knows how it's bad and will only get worse. But the political aspect of this paralyzes progress. Prescribed burns for example: they get shut down because people don't like the smoke and they call their senators. Imagine that. Even if that wasn't a problem, burning is incredibly labor intensive and we more than a century behind. Prescribed burns for a meaningful fraction of Western lands would take an absolutely massive effort and funding. It is skilled and labor intensive work. It's also not risk free. Not that burns will save us. I fear that warming/drying climate likely means the end of forests in much of the US West no matter what we do.
I missed the 40 acres part, thats ludicrous. I live about a mile from the 3.6+ million selway bitterroot / frank church wilderness complex ... you would need a lot of drones just to cover the parts near towns.
I do think there would be some merit in a system that could detect a smoke plume quickly and slow them enough to give crews time to safely get there especially on days with multiple starts.