Todd Colten gently pushed his right arm forward, and with that movement, the first test of the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department’s search-and-rescue drone was off the ground.
The 4-pound airplane, black with orange trim on the wings and an orange underbelly, quickly gained altitude after leaving Colten’s hand and circled a programmed route above a 400-acre agricultural field a few hundred yards west of the Salton Sea near Thermal on Wednesday morning, June 1.
“When we train, we say it’s like throwing darts in a bar,” said Colten, chief aerospace engineer for Minneapolis-based Sentera, which supplied two Phoenix M2 unmanned aerial vehicles for the one-year evaluation period at a cost of $1. “From the moment you throw it, it’s flying.”
Sheriff’s officials hope the training and testing are concluded much faster — more like three months. They estimate they went on more search-and-rescue missions in 2015 than the 170 in 2014 … MORE
Riverside, CA Press-Enterprise | June 1, 2016
