Years ago we had a pretty big fire near where I live. I have a garage full of all kinds of high-end flying things. From gliders to heli's and multi-rotors. And yes, some of them are setup to carry cameras, GPS, etc.
Due to regulations I have never flown any of these rigs outside of local RC model aircraft fields (meaning AMA chartered clubs [0]).
I have a couple that are perfectly capable of autonomous extended-duration GPS-guided flight. I know the local fire department folks very well. During the fire I offered to put up one of my birds to get them more data. They could not fly full scale craft due to wind, smoke and other issues. The RC drones could handle this without a problem.
The bottom line was that these guys really wanted to do it but, ultimately opted against it. They have rules they have to go by and they literally did not have a way to get clearance to even attempt it. They made a few calls to local airspace control centers and either got "are you fucking kidding" or "no clue how to do this" as responses. Tragically this delayed them getting potentially valuable information on the fire for almost a full day.
This thing in Colorado could boil down to some such mechanism. In that well-known funny movie cliche where the FBI comes in, takes over an investigation and manages to fuck it up, FEMA could be going by the same playbook. Their mode of operation could very well be to take over. Anything the local FEMA guys don't understand is rejected auto-magically, regardless of the merits. You probably can't reach that guy at a high enough intellectual level to even have him consider the idea that this could be a very valuable tool during this disaster. "This is the way we've been doing it for years kid."
Due to regulations I have never flown any of these rigs outside of local RC model aircraft fields (meaning AMA chartered clubs [0]).
I have a couple that are perfectly capable of autonomous extended-duration GPS-guided flight. I know the local fire department folks very well. During the fire I offered to put up one of my birds to get them more data. They could not fly full scale craft due to wind, smoke and other issues. The RC drones could handle this without a problem.
The bottom line was that these guys really wanted to do it but, ultimately opted against it. They have rules they have to go by and they literally did not have a way to get clearance to even attempt it. They made a few calls to local airspace control centers and either got "are you fucking kidding" or "no clue how to do this" as responses. Tragically this delayed them getting potentially valuable information on the fire for almost a full day.
This thing in Colorado could boil down to some such mechanism. In that well-known funny movie cliche where the FBI comes in, takes over an investigation and manages to fuck it up, FEMA could be going by the same playbook. Their mode of operation could very well be to take over. Anything the local FEMA guys don't understand is rejected auto-magically, regardless of the merits. You probably can't reach that guy at a high enough intellectual level to even have him consider the idea that this could be a very valuable tool during this disaster. "This is the way we've been doing it for years kid."
[0] http://www.modelaircraft.org/membership/clubs.aspx