An 18-year-old whitewater kayak guide from Grass Valley, California is building an autonomous rescue drone because he watched the gap between an emergency and the arrival of help cost someone he loved. Lev Weisswasser lost a close friend and mentor in a kayaking accident. His answer is Winter, a drone system designed to find people with thermal imaging and fly water or a defibrillator into places an ambulance cannot reach.
A Kayaking Death Turned Into An Engineering Project
Weisswasser guides whitewater kayaking trips, and the job has shown him more than one emergency where help was too far away. The death of his friend and mentor turned that pattern personal. In January, the high school senior decided to build the tool he wished had existed, according to reporting by Channel 3000.
The geography explains the problem he is solving. Grass Valley sits in the Sierra Nevada foothills, where river canyons and forest roads stretch response times well past what a patient in the water can afford. A guide learns fast that the first minutes belong to whoever is already there, because nobody else can arrive in time.
“I’m going to try to do something exceptional,” Weisswasser said.
He is not new to chasing ambitious builds. He tried to code a jetpack at age 10 after watching Iron Man, and he developed Winter while carrying five AP classes, a school leadership role, and his guide work.
This fall he heads to Cal Poly San Luis Obispo to study aerospace engineering. That puts him in the same state where a large share of the American drone industry already operates, including Skydio, the biggest US drone manufacturer, headquartered in San Mateo.
Winter Pairs Thermal Search With Payload Delivery
The system combines two jobs that usually belong to separate aircraft. Winter uses thermal imaging to locate a person, then delivers what that person needs to survive the wait: water, or an automated external defibrillator for a cardiac emergency.
“Its perfect purpose is to go in the hard-to-reach places,” Weisswasser said.
The software is fully developed and tested in a simulator. The hardware is the unfinished half. Weisswasser has a small demonstration model, and the working prototype he wants to build would be four times larger. He is still raising the money to build it.
That honesty about the project’s stage matters. Winter has not flown a rescue, and DroneXL is not claiming it has. What an 18-year-old has at this point is an architecture, a simulator record, and a reason.
The hardest part of this build is exactly what he is attempting: autonomy, thermal imaging, and payload delivery combined in a single aircraft. What sets it apart is who is designing it, a kayak guide who knows the real problem on the ground, not an engineer at a desk.
The Industry Record Says The Teenager Is Right
The architecture Weisswasser sketched on his own is the one the industry keeps validating. A DJI Matrice delivered an AED to a 71-year-old man in Sweden in three minutes back in January 2022, the first drone AED delivery in history that led to a successful resuscitation. DroneXL covered that flight when it happened.
The pattern has only grown since. Forsyth County, North Carolina demonstrated drone-delivered AEDs in 2024. The UK’s National Health Service moved on defibrillator drones in 2025. Everdrone put medical drones into Stockholm’s EMS system this February, and Kansas logged a 30-mile autonomous medical delivery last September. Newport News, Virginia now sends drones to 911 calls in 90 seconds, a response time no ground unit in that city can touch.
The medical logic behind all of it is brutal and simple. In a cardiac arrest, survival odds fall with every minute that passes before defibrillation, which is why a clinical study DroneXL covered in 2024 measured drone AED delivery in minutes saved against ambulances. A machine that shortens the wait changes the outcome, whoever builds it.
The thermal half of Winter’s job description got its own proof this weekend, when a St. Cloud police drone found a missing 73-year-old man alive in a Minnesota cornfield after planes, helicopters, and K-9 teams spent hours searching. Find the person, deliver the intervention. Every piece of Winter’s mission already works somewhere, just not yet in one affordable airframe.
DroneXL’s Take
Let’s be straight, the odds say most high school engineering projects die in the garage, and Winter still needs funding, a real airframe, and years of the regulatory grind that every rescue drone operator in this industry knows too well. Part 107 waivers, beyond visual line of sight approvals, public safety agency buy-in.
None of that cares how good your simulator looks.
But the direction of the bet is correct, and the industry’s own record is the evidence. Sweden proved the AED delivery saves lives. Minnesota proved the thermal find works in the field. A teenager connecting those two proven halves is not a fantasy, it is a product roadmap the majors have been slow to unify.
There is also the part of this story that has nothing to do with hardware. The drone industry gets its next generation from exactly this: a kid who watched a rescue arrive late and decided the fix was his responsibility. Cal Poly’s aerospace program is getting a student who already knows why the engineering matters.
This is the kind of talent that companies like Skydio should have an eye on, and put to full use before someone else does. Take note.
Sources: Channel 3000, Action News Now
