Safety · Ordinary People
The mountain rescue volunteers who taught a drone what does not belong on a mountain
Dan Roach, David Binks, Dan Parsons · The Lake District, England, and Glen Etive, Scotland
Charlie Kelly had been missing on a Scottish mountain for six weeks when three Lake District volunteers drove up with two drones and software they had written in their own time. They found him inside the first hour, and his family got an answer before winter.
The person and the place
Dan Roach is 34, a climber who flew drones for photography work before ever searching with one, and has been out with Cockermouth Mountain Rescue in the Lake District for about ten years, which somehow still leaves Roach among the younger people on the team. David Binks is 57, volunteers with Duddon and Furness Mountain Rescue, and spent a working life writing simulation code for wind farms and offshore oil rigs. Back in 2007 Binks wrote a program called MR Maps, which let rescue teams watch their own members move across a map in near real time using pings from their radios, and handed it to UK mountain rescue for nothing. Dan Parsons, a friend and teammate of Roach's at Cockermouth, had been running the early experiments with Roach. Roach is the ideas one. Binks is the quiet one with the analytical brain. Mountain rescue in the UK is staffed entirely by volunteers, in teams that are each a separate registered charity raising their own money for their own kit.
The problem they cared about
When camera drones got cheap in the early 2010s, everyone in mountain rescue assumed the searching problem was solved. Roach was not convinced. "Everyone thought, ‘This is going to be brilliant because I can see things.’ But then they realized you have to be very close to the thing that you want to see, and you have to be able to see it on a very small controller." The ground is the other half of it. Brian Brathurst, a deputy team leader at Glencoe Mountain Rescue, describes that ground without drama: "There's a lot of boulder fields, there's a lot of gully systems, and you could walk within five or 10 meters of somebody and not see them."
The agency moment
Nobody asked for this and nobody funded it. The two of them met over the winter of 2021 into 2022, and Binks came away certain that Roach's idea belonged inside MR Maps rather than alongside it. Then came two years of what Binks calls "some hideous maths." The hours were Binks's own. "I'd start at 9 in the morning, and before I realized, it would be 3 in the morning, and I'd just been at it all day." What Binks ended up with plans a drone's flight path off the Ordnance Survey lidar data that underpins British maps, works out the grid reference of any single pixel in any photo it takes, and then does the part that matters: it counts the pixels of every color in a picture and flags the clusters that are unusual for that picture. Not a trained model, and nothing clever about jackets. Just a count, and an outlier. "Usually it's funny-colored moss, or rocks, or a sheep," Roach says. "But every now and again, it's a person." The whole thing runs offline, because the places it is needed have no signal. Then came the decision that was not technical at all. A search in Scotland had been going for weeks and the three of them had a prototype they had never tested on anything real. "I'd heard this search was going on," Binks says, "and I kept thinking this would be quite a good place to try and test the system out. Then Dan phoned me while I was on my way home from holiday. He'd had the same idea." They called Glencoe Mountain Rescue and asked if they could help. "I don't think they thought anything was going to come of it," Binks says. "So they were happy for us to try."
What changed, with evidence
Charlie Kelly was 56, a father of three, and worked as a forensic psychologist inside the Scottish Prisons Service. On September 6, 2023 he left home in Tillicoultry to climb Creise, the peak above Glen Etive. The last message his partner Emer Kennedy had from him put the Glencoe Ski Center lights in view and him back at the car in half an hour. Ten mountain rescue teams searched for him alongside the Coastguard, Police Scotland, and the RAF, with sniffer dogs, quad bikes, helicopters, and conventional drones, at times fifty people on the hill at once. They found his backpack on September 9. After that, nothing, for six weeks. Glencoe scaled back the formal operation after ten days but never actually stopped. "But on our patch, we don't tend to give up on these things," Brathurst says. "We were out every free day we had." On the morning of October 24 the three of them drove up with two drones and split the most promising areas between them, with a Glencoe team member along. Binks started on Area A, the drone drifted out of sight about ten minutes in, and Binks called it back irritated that it had gone wrong, set it flying over Area B, and scrolled through Area A's flagged photos while waiting. "Two of the images had Mr. Kelly in them. I was stunned." It was inside the first hour. Kelly had fallen into a gully, on ground that search teams had walked more than once, and what he had on finished the job of hiding him. "He was wearing a lightish brown top and dark blue trousers," Binks says. "To the human eye that's really hard to pick out." Brathurst was one of the people who had walked it: "We literally walked within probably 20 or 30 meters of him." Binks puts the credit where the six weeks went. "Without the work Glencoe had done, there's no way we'd be able to do what we did." Emer Kennedy got her answer before the winter closed in. "I'm just glad we have closure. It means his kids can have a life."
The move worth copying
The software has flown on searches since, mostly to rule areas out, and Parsons keeps the record honest about what that amounts to: "Although we've only found one person, we've never flown over an area where someone was and not found them yet." Binks has never charged anyone for MR Maps and is not about to start, police forces included. "I've never really been interested in monetizing it." But the move worth copying is smaller than the software and costs nothing to borrow. Three volunteers had a half-tested prototype and knew about a search that had run out of ideas, and they phoned a team of strangers before anybody asked them to. The call came before the confidence did. Know someone sitting on a half-finished thing who already knows exactly who it would help? Feed the scout at goodinprogress.org.
"We'd found our coats in fields and simulated it, but we'd never found anything that we didn't know we'd already put there." — Dan Parsons, WIRED
Sources
Here is where this story came from. Go read the originals.
Curated by Good in Progress from the public record.
Sources last verified .
- WIRED, Tristan Kennedy, original reporting and interviews with all three builders ↗
- BBC News, Steven McKenzie, BBC Scotland News ↗
- grough, Bob Smith, Editor ↗
- Press and Journal, Aberdeen, D.C. Thomson ↗
- Mountain Rescue England and Wales, NON-INDEPENDENT, the subject organization's own statement ↗
- RICS Land Journal, NON-INDEPENDENT, written by Brendan O'Neill, national drone officer for Mountain Rescue England and Wales ↗
