Drone Rescue, XPrize Wildfire Competition, 4-Hour Flight Record, and FAA Waiver Changes

Welcome to your weekly UAS news update. I have four stories for you this week that show just how much is happening in this industry right now, from a life-saving rescue in Kentucky to regulatory changes you need to know about if you’re planning to submit a waiver.

This week’s stories:

• A drone finds a missing person in Kentucky after 29 hours in freezing temperatures
• The XPrize competition pushing autonomous drones to fight wildfires
• An unofficial world record for the longest endurance multi-rotor flight
• Changes to how the FAA handles waiver submissions

Let’s get to it.

Thermal Drone Saves Man Missing 29 Hours in Freezing Cold

First up this week is a drones for good story out of Kentucky. On December 20 in LaGrange, a local man was reported missing after failing to return from his routine afternoon walk. As temperatures dropped and daylight faded, the Oldham County search and rescue team was called in.

The search area included a lot more than just the neighborhood. Large, dense forest areas were completely unreachable either on foot or even by ATV. The county’s aerial response team deployed a mobile command post and launched multiple drones, including a DJI thermal drone.

After hours of searching, one of the assistant chief pilots, Justin Hilliard, spotted a faint heat signature on his thermal feed. He said it didn’t look like a person at first. It looked more like a plastic garbage bag filled with water. But a team member was sent to the location on foot, and moments later they confirmed it was actually the missing man.

He was alive after 29 hours in the bitter cold and was unable to walk. Thanks to the drone, this ended up being a rescue and not something worse.

Obviously, in light of the previous week’s story we talked about with the ban from the FCC, this is yet another reminder that another person’s life was saved using an inexpensive drone that had a thermal camera on it. DroneXL covered this story and made an important point: the exact drone that helped save this man’s life may soon be unavailable to the very teams proving its value.

XPrize Wildfire Competition: Autonomous Drones Fighting Fires

Next up, we’re looking at how drones are being used to fight wildfires before they even get started. This is the XPrize Wildfire competition, and it’s pushing the boundaries for autonomous technology with a massive challenge.

The challenge is to find and extinguish a wildfire inside of a 1,000 square kilometer area and to extinguish it within 10 minutes.

One team called Crossfire, headquartered at the University of Maryland, is using a true drone system. The first one is the eye of the operation: an off-the-shelf DJI drone equipped with thermal and optical cameras. The video feed passes through a deep learning model trained on thousands of fire images, enabling it to detect real fires while ignoring false positives.

Once the fire is confirmed, they send the second drone, which is the action drone. This is a Freefly Alta X, a heavy-lift platform made in the United States that’s normally used for cinema cameras. It’s tasked with carrying a water-filled balloon and then dropping that balloon in a very precise location just meters on top of the flames to extinguish the fire at the source.

We all know that drones cannot carry the same amount of water that a helicopter can, but here precision is the key. Traditional aircraft drop water from high altitude with a lot of it scattered by the wind. This method instead uses very precise pinpointing of the fire and reduces waste, extinguishing the fire with a much smaller amount of water.

Regulations around autonomous flights and payload drops are still a major hurdle for this kind of solution. But the competition is important because it funds research and allows engineers to test different components so that firefighters don’t have to do it with their lives. It really helps show what’s possible and demonstrates that drones can give firefighters the one thing they need the most: more time.

Pretty cool competition if you ask me, and we’ll keep you posted if we see more developments.

Unofficial World Record: 4-Hour Multi-Rotor Flight

The next story comes from our friend Alex Suarez, who holds multiple different hats in the industry, including drone builder. He created a multi-rotor drone that flies for 4 hours. That’s right, you heard that right. Four-hour flight time.

This is not a small drone either. It’s a large hexacopter with very large propellers. Large is an understatement here. Currently, I can’t say what flight controller, battery, and propellers he’s using because he’s trying to get an official attempt with the Guinness World Record.

But this is an extremely impressive achievement, especially considering that this was 4 hours of hover time, not forward flight time. Forward flight is generally more efficient, so hover time is the harder benchmark.

For context, the current Guinness World Record for longest flight of an electrically powered prototype multirotor drone in the 5-20 kg category is held by SiFly Aviation at 3 hours, 11 minutes, and 54 seconds, set in July 2025. If Alex’s 4-hour flight gets verified, it would be a significant jump.

Alex is in the process of attempting a Guinness World Record, and we’ll keep you updated when we hear more. But for now, great job on that first attempt.

FAA Changes Waiver Submission Process

Finally, the FAA has changed the process to submit waivers. Instead of submitting through the FAA DroneZone, waivers are now being submitted through what’s called the Aviation Safety Portal.

This is only for waivers. We’re going to have a full video about this change very soon. We’re updating our waiver course to help folks go to the right place.

But for now, if you have a waiver to submit, here’s what you need to know:

• Make sure you have a Login.gov account first. You’re going to need that.
• Submit all new waiver requests through the new Aviation Safety Portal
• For registration and airspace authorization, everything is still done under the old FAA DroneZone

This is an important change for Part 107 operators who need waivers for operations like BVLOS or flying over people beyond the standard rule allowances. If you’ve been putting off a waiver application, now’s the time to get your Login.gov account set up before you need it.

That’s it for this week. Happy New Year and we’ll see you on Postflight, which is our premium community show where we share our uncensored opinions about all of this, including what we talked about last week with the FCC stuff.

Make sure you don’t miss it.