OCTOBER 2, 2024 – The Oklahoma National Guard partnered with Southwestern Oklahoma State University, the Oklahoma Highway Patrol and Weatherford Fire Department to host a multi-agency wildland firefighting unmanned aerial systems integration exercise at Crowder Lake Sept. 25-26.
The exercise brought the Oklahoma National Guard, state and local agencies and private UAS companies together to develop a common operating picture, ensuring all public safety teams have a shared view of a multi-agency response to events like wildland firefighting.
Col. Shane Riley, director of military support for the Oklahoma National Guard, explained the importance of bringing these organizations together as the use of drones in domestic operations becomes more prominent.
“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,” Riley said.
The two-day exercise tested the OKNG’s and public safety organizations’ 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 unmanned and manned 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 ICP quickly and safely cleared the airspace for the resupply mission.
Chad Kinder, vice president of Strategic Partnership at SWOSU, said the need for organized procedures and strategic planning is becoming more critical as demand for unmanned aerial systems increases.
“We’re seeing more and more [unmanned aerial vehicles] in use,” Kinder said. “The Weatherford Fire Department just added drones in the last year, so it’s a great thing for these agencies to get together and learn how to use these UAV in the same airspace at the same time.”
Oklahoma Highway Patrol Lt. Scott Patton, drone coordinator for the Oklahoma Department of Public Safety, said exercises like this help to bring together the many agencies that would be operating UAS in an emergency before the emergency.
“When we’re operating our unmanned aircraft and getting the picture of the fire or the incident that happened within the state, we can also make it safe for manned aircraft to come into the picture and do their water drops and search and rescue,” Patton 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.”
By Staff Sgt. Reece Heck
Oklahoma National Guard