DRONERESPONDERS SAR Working Group Hosts May 19 Virtual Meetup on Drone Pilot Training

DRONERESPONDERS and the Mountain Rescue Association (MRA) have scheduled their next Search and Rescue (SAR) Working Group virtual roundtable for May 19, 2026. The session focuses on training — specifically how to become a more efficient small Unmanned Aircraft Systems (sUAS) SAR pilot — and is open to anyone who works in or cares about drone-assisted rescue operations. Kyle Nordfors announced the meetup on LinkedIn. A link to join will be emailed to participants. To get on the list, contact Nordfors at WCSARdrone@gmail.com.

DRONERESPONDERS SAR Working Group Targets Training This Quarter

The Q1 2026 roundtable centers on one agenda item: training. That means how to get the most out of SAR pilots, how to prepare for the challenges that each new season brings, and how to apply proven aviation safety frameworks to sUAS operations. The session will cover Crew Resource Management (CRM) and Threat and Error Management (TEM) — methodologies long established in commercial aviation — along with extreme weather operations, lost person behavior, search theory, and regulatory questions. Attendees are encouraged to bring their own questions on any of those subjects.

The focus on CRM and TEM is not accidental. Both frameworks exist to reduce human error in high-stakes, time-pressured environments. In commercial aviation, they are mandatory. In sUAS SAR, they are not — and the gap between those two realities costs time when time is exactly what a missing person does not have. Bringing that rigor into volunteer and agency drone programs is one of the core reasons this working group exists.

DRONERESPONDERS SAR Working Group Is New — and Modeled on a Proven Template

The SAR Working Group is one of several specialized working groups within DRONERESPONDERS, the world’s leading nonprofit supporting public safety UAS operations. It is the newest of those groups, formed to share lessons learned, develop best practices, and push for regulatory changes that make drone-assisted SAR safer and more effective. Membership is open. There are no vendor pitches. The stated philosophy is that search and rescue is staffed mostly by volunteers, and the group exists to help all of them grow together.

That model has already delivered measurable results in a related DRONERESPONDERS program. The Drone as a First Responder (DFR) Working Group spent years advocating with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to streamline the waiver process for autonomous drone operations. In 2025, that advocacy paid off: according to DRONERESPONDERS, the FAA cut approval time from more than a year to under a week, and approvals jumped from roughly 50 over six years to nearly 600 in four months. The SAR Working Group is building toward the same kind of regulatory impact — but for the specific, terrain-driven, often-volunteer world of search and rescue.

SAR Drone Programs Are Spreading, But Training Lags Behind Hardware

The Mountain Rescue Association, which partners on this working group, covers over 90 SAR teams across North America. A few years ago, roughly 20 percent of MRA member teams had drone programs in some stage of development. That figure now sits close to 80 percent. Hardware adoption has outrun standardized training — and that gap is where the SAR Working Group is doing its work.

The numbers from programs that have invested in training are hard to ignore. Weber County Search and Rescue in Utah, one of the most documented sUAS SAR programs in the country, cut average search time from four hours and 35 minutes down to 58 minutes after standing up its drone program. That is not a technology story alone. That is a training story.

DroneXL has covered the human cost of this gap directly. In our December 2025 investigation into DJI drones saving American lives, we documented rescue after rescue where the difference between a find and a fatality came down to the drone pilot knowing exactly what to do, fast. Training is not an administrative checkbox. It is what separates a successful deployment from a wasted battery.

Mark These SAR Drone Dates for the Rest of 2026

The May 19 SAR Working Group meetup sits inside a dense calendar of SAR-relevant events this year. Per the Q1 2026 DRONERESPONDERS SAR Working Group flyer, four are worth tracking.

The NASAR Missing and Unidentified Persons Conference 2026 runs April 21-23 in Las Vegas at Planet Hollywood. Now in its 16th year, this is the national gathering for missing persons professionals, organized by the National Criminal Justice Training Center in partnership with the National Association for Search And Rescue (NASAR).

LEDA Utah follows May 5-8 in Ogden, Utah — the Law Enforcement Drone Association’s regional event, with a natural focus on sUAS integration in public safety operations in rugged western terrain.

The MRA Conference convenes June 12-14 in Juneau, Alaska — the Mountain Rescue Association’s annual in-person gathering for the teams that do this work on the ground, often in the kind of vertical terrain where a drone is the only asset that can safely search first.

Then in September, the Commercial UAV Expo (September 1-3, Las Vegas) brings the DRONERESPONDERS Public Safety Summit back to Caesars Forum. That summit delivers two days of programming specifically for first responder UAS program managers and remote pilots, with after-action reviews from law enforcement, fire, EMS, and SAR agencies across the Americas.

DroneXL’s Take

The DFR Working Group’s track record is the most important context for understanding what the SAR Working Group can become. Five years of organized advocacy, peer knowledge-sharing, and FAA engagement produced a regulatory shift that went from 50 approvals in six years to nearly 600 in four months. That is what a well-run working group looks like when it plays the long game. The SAR community has not had that kind of organized voice at the regulatory table — until now. DroneXL covered the growing recognition of SAR drone leadership when Kyle Nordfors won the Unsung Hero Award at the 2025 Global Search and Rescue Excellence Awards in London — a sign that the community’s credibility is already building internationally.

I have covered enough SAR drone deployments over the years to know that the hardware problem is mostly solved. We have thermal cameras, extended flight times, and sub-kilogram aircraft that can search a square mile an hour in good conditions. The remaining problem is human. It is inconsistent training, no shared standards, and teams reinventing procedures that other teams already figured out two seasons ago. That is exactly what this working group is designed to fix.

Expect the DRONERESPONDERS SAR Working Group to have a formal best-practices document in front of the FAA by the end of 2027. The DFR playbook was not fast, but it was effective. The SAR community is starting from a stronger foundation.

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.