•
Nerissa Goedhart
5 ways public safety agencies are already using drones today
Drone as First Responder programmes are often talked about as something on the horizon. For a growing number of public safety agencies, they are already routine. Here are five ways drones are being used in live operations right now, with real examples from agencies running them at scale.
1. Cutting response times below 90 seconds
Dubai Police built its Drone as First Responder programme around a single target: reaching any incident scene in under 90 seconds, faster than traffic and urban density would normally allow a ground unit to arrive. Emergency calls trigger the nearest drone automatically from a fixed dock, sending live video to the command centre before officers reach the scene. The programme now runs response times as low as 1 minute and 25 seconds, with more than 25 operators coordinating missions through a single interface. You can read the full Dubai Police case study for more detail.
2. Coordinating hundreds of pilots across a national wildfire response
Portugal's Bombeiros run one of Europe's largest public safety drone networks, with more than 700 pilots spread across regions and agencies handling wildfires inland and search and rescue missions along the coast. Bringing that many pilots and drone fleets under one system means thermal feeds from a fire front can reach a command centre in real time, and pilot certifications and maintenance records stay current across hundreds of decentralised teams rather than sitting in separate local systems. As Pedro Tavares, Head of Drone Trainings and Operations at the Escola Nacional de Bombeiros, puts it: "With AirHub, we have a single, secure platform to coordinate hundreds of drone teams across different regions and agencies, whether it's wildfires inland or maritime rescues along the coast." Read the Bombeiros Portugal case study for the full picture.
3. Running multiple drones on one target during a manhunt
A single drone feed only tells part of the story during a pursuit or a large-scale search. The Belgian Police use a layered approach: one drone holds a high-precision zoom on a target while a second maintains a wider overview, with both feeds and flight paths visible to the same command centre at once. That combination has directly contributed to the recovery of missing persons and the apprehension of suspects during live operations. Bram Schoors, Chief Inspector and Drone Pilot at the Federal Police Belgium, describes the outcome plainly: "We have already been able to find two missing persons alive and well thanks to the deployment of the drone via the platform." Kristof van den Broeck, First Inspector, adds that having one platform for the whole workflow matters as much as the flight itself: "The streamed images all converge in one place, and we have a perfect overview afterwards through the log data." See the Belgian Police case study for the details.
4. Giving commanders a live overview during large events
Crowd monitoring is one of the more established public safety uses of drones: a wide aerial view over a stadium, a march or a public gathering gives commanders a perspective ground teams cannot get on their own. Rather than relying on radio reports from officers positioned around a venue, a command centre can watch density build in real time and redirect resources to a specific entrance, exit or pressure point before it becomes a safety issue. The same live feed can be shared with partner agencies working the same event, fire services, medical teams, transport authorities, so everyone involved in keeping an event safe is working from the same picture rather than relaying information second-hand. During multi-day events, that overview also helps commanders plan the next shift's deployment based on what actually happened, rather than what was reported after the fact.
5. Supporting search and rescue at sea and on the coast
Coastal and maritime search and rescue benefits from exactly the combination that makes drones useful elsewhere: fast deployment, a wide search area covered quickly, and thermal imaging that can pick out a person in the water long before a vessel or a ground team would spot them. A drone can be airborne and scanning a stretch of coastline in the time it takes a boat to leave harbour, and thermal cameras keep working after dark or in poor visibility, when the odds for someone in the water fall fastest. Coordinating that with coastguard and lifeboat crews on the water, so the drone feeds directly into the wider response, is what turns a faster search into a faster rescue. The Dutch KNRM, the national sea rescue service, uses drones exactly this way, and you can read how it works in practice in making search and rescue missions more efficient. It is part of why coastal agencies increasingly treat drones as a standard part of the response.
What these have in common
None of these examples are pilot projects anymore. They are operational programmes running every day, at a scale that depends on the same underlying requirements: fast deployment, live video that reaches the right people immediately, and a system that can manage hundreds of pilots and mixed drone fleets without adding administrative weight to every mission.
That is the same foundation AirHub is built on. The platform covers the full mission lifecycle, planning, flying, logging and managing a fleet, hardware agnostic across drone brands and docks rather than tied to a single manufacturer, and built and hosted in Europe. Live video and telemetry reach a command centre through the Drone Operations Center, with automated flight logging and compliance running in the background rather than as separate admin. It is the same platform behind Dubai Police's sub-90 second response times, Bombeiros Portugal's 700-plus pilot network, and the Belgian Police operations described above, for public safety teams working at very different scales.
