This Student-Built Drone Could Help Solve America's Wildfire Problem

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The United States is one of the largest countries on Earth. It covers an astonishing amount of land, and a lot of it is very humid, with millions of acres of tree-lined land. This means, unfortunately, that it's particularly susceptible to the scourge of wildfires. The number of these blazes is truly horrifying, with Statista noting that 56,580 wildfires occurred in the United States in 2023 and 64,897 in 2024. With blazes on the scale of wildfires, it's possible for great swathes to be burnt down before the fire services can bring them under control. What we can hope, then, is that this drone-based response to fire outbreaks, designed by students, can be an important weapon in detecting and responding to fires as quickly as possible. 

One of the key aspects of the rising utility of the drone, whether in military or civilian applications, is its maneuverability. It can get into the air and provide video or audio far faster than a human typically could, and, depending on what it's equipped with, respond to the situation accordingly. We have already seen one way that the New York City Fire Department is using drones to save lives, and over in California, a group of students is developing a way for the technology to be used to help manage a potential fire before it erupts into a full-blown conflagration. 

In Orange County, ABC News reports, a system of towers is in use that detects any fires that break out, thereby giving the fire service as much warning as possible. What the students are now working on is using this system to send the location of said outbreak to a firefighting drone, which will hopefully be able to respond super quickly to help manage or even prevent that fire's quick growth. 

How the system is intended to work

It's crucial to know how the tower detection systems function. Their creator, Ryan Honary, the founder of Sensory AI, explained to Ginger Zee of ABC News: "It detects for the three main signatures of wildfire. There's the smoke, heat plume, and the flame." The next step is to bring another form of AI to bear against the issue by equipping a fire-fighting drone with this information and allowing it to speed directly towards the fire as quickly as the information has been provided. These efforts are part of a $3.5 million XPrize contest to develop new means of tackling wildfires, the final of which is scheduled for June 2026.

Daniel Kim, the Vice President of Valley Christian Schools, explains to the outlet that "it ... says, hey, there's a fire in this location." The drone will actually get to the coordinate and, once it's adjusted, it's going to release its payload." It's important to note that this drone functionality isn't intended to be a one-stop firefighting solution. It may indeed be capable of single-handedly extinguishing a smaller, developing blaze by itself, but damage control and minimization of the threat are key, delaying growth until the firefighting cavalry can arrive. 

Kevin Fetterman (Ret), Orange County Fire Authority Division Chief, details how the conventional fire service and this new technological development could work in tandem. Fetterman states, "those drones could launch the same time we launch our apparatus... they could get on scene, utilize their extinguishing agent ... hold the fire in check until, uh, our fire engines and our firefighters and our helicopters and our air tankers can all get on scene." It's the first response factor that's going to be really critical to minimizing the impact of a fire.  

Drones' capacity to tackle fires

The Eaton and Palisades fires of January 2025 in Los Angeles, for instance, burned from January 7-31, destroying 37,000 acres of precious land across an area of approximately 45 square miles. It's one of the most terrifying displays of nature's raw power of all, and it's the scale that these fires can achieve that's the real danger. This is why a faster initial response means a better chance of bringing the fire under control faster, which is where drones come in so handy. As Ginger Zee of ABC News puts it, "most fires don't start in a place that's really easy to access. So firefighters might take minutes or hours to get there without roads, but a drone ... could get there in seconds." Minimizing its growth until the firefighters can arrive, then, is the goal when a drone can't dispatch a fire alone. 

Something else that's important to take into account is that we often think of drones as small, evasive devices. They can be, of course, but there's no reason to think they wouldn't be effective in the firefighting role because of their size. Kaizen Aerospace developed the drones that were used for the collaborative project, and has a range of differently-sized drones depending on the scale of the situation. One of its most formidable, for the fire-fighting role in particular, measures 13 feet and, the outlet reports, can carry a payload of up to 1,000 pounds, a considerable amount of water. For their rapid movement and convenience, as well as their capacity to reduce the need to send professionals into danger, firefighting drones are a technology that is sure to become increasingly important. Other technology, such as highly-rated wildfire tracking apps, can also help to keep communities safe.