Morrison nonprofit sends drones to seek climbers

Jim Erickson, Rocky Mountain News

Published December 14, 2006 at midnight

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A Morrison-based company sent several small, heat-seeking unmanned airplanes to help in the search for missing mountaineers on Oregon's Mount Hood.

The nonprofit ARACAR company provided Nighthawk drones equipped with streaming video and a thermal imaging system that might be able to spot body heat, said Chris Nagelvoort, the company's director of operations.

Blinding snow and powerful winds hampered the rescue effort Wednesday. But Nagelvoort said the hand-launched unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, will join the search as soon as weather allows it.

"We have it all set up and ready to go. We're just waiting for the wind to subside," Nagelvoort said Wednesday night from a base camp on Mount Hood.

The company had three Nighthawks on-site Wednesday, and two more UAVs were expected today.

Nighthawks were developed for the Defense Department and have been used in Afghanistan and Iraq, said Michael Pierce, the company's assistant director of support.

The propeller-driven planes have a wingspan of roughly 2 feet and can fly 90 minutes before requiring a battery change.

In Colorado, ARACAR has tested them at elevations of up to 12,000 feet, so they should be able to fly over the 11,239-foot summit of Mount Hood.

The planes execute a pre-programmed flight path, navigating with an onboard GPS receiver. They generally fly 200 to 400 feet above the ground, Nagelvoort said.

ARACAR stands for Alliance for Robotic Assisted Crisis Assessment and Response.

The company has five permanent employees but calls in outside experts to help in various types of rescues using robots, small unmanned submarines and drones, said Morrison operations manager Arianne Harker.

ARACAR relocated to Morrison about a year ago from Louisiana, where the team helped in Hurricane Katrina recovery, Harker said. In September 2001, company president John Blitch organized the first robot-assisted urban rescue effort, at the World Trade Center.

Blitch is a former Colorado School of Mines student and a retired lieutenant colonel in the Army.

A second Colorado company, Io-max, of Denver, will try to detect faint signals from one of the climbers' cell phones, according to the Associated Press. Iomax is a wireless and data network security company.

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