Safety · Ordinary People
The alpine commander who would rather a drone guess out loud than say nothing
Phillip Eberle, Russell Turner, John Marzol · Kosciuszko National Park, New South Wales, Australia
Police called for help from the air on a freezing alpine night, and the Jindabyne crew that answered flew a drone that speaks up while it is still unsure, with two hikers out of the park in under five hours.
The person and the place
Phillip Eberle is an Inspector with Fire and Rescue NSW and the regional duty commander for the New South Wales alpine area, which makes the Snowy Mountains in June Eberle's patch. The fire station that matters here is at Jindabyne, the last real town before the high country, about 35 kilometers from the Dead Horse Gap walking track, which lies to the southwest. The drone belongs to the FRNSW Aviation Unit, whose team leader and chief remote pilot is another Inspector, Russell Turner. Turner puts the aircraft inside a statewide upgrade that has been arriving for about 18 months. Each one carries four cameras, infrared among them, and software that reads thousands of images in real time, and the same aircraft can lay roads, bush tracks, and fire trails over the operator's screen while a search is running. The people who flew one that night were not specialists sent up from a city. They were the local firefighters at Jindabyne, and in FRNSW's own account of the rescue, Acting Superintendent John Marzol credited exactly that: "The training and support provided by FRNSW's Aviation Unit ensured local firefighters had the skills and equipment to support Police and the SES to effect a successful operation."
The problem they cared about
On the evening of Tuesday, June 23, 2026, two hikers in their early 20s walking the Dead Horse Gap track failed to reach their rendezvous point. They were reported missing at 7pm. By then it was dark and cold, and they had drifted some 500 meters clear of the marked route, which in broken alpine country is far enough to be invisible. NSW Police put an Alpine Search and Rescue team on the ground, with State Emergency Service volunteers alongside them, and called Fire and Rescue NSW for help from the air. The arithmetic of a night search in the snowfields is not only about the people who are lost. Every hour it runs is another hour of volunteers out on a freezing mountain.
The agency moment
The call went to the Jindabyne station, and from the command post the crew put a remotely piloted aircraft up and started flying a grid. What the software on board actually does is narrower than it sounds, and it turns on a decision about doubt. "The AI scans the area and scans the information that it can see on its camera and says, 'OK, this item that I'm looking at has a 35 per cent chance of being human'," Eberle told About Regional. The instinct is to want a higher bar than that. Eberle's point is that the higher bar is the thing that loses people. "If we'd mark that as being, say, 100 per cent [sure that it was a human], it wouldn't pick it up," Eberle said. "It would say, 'No, I can't 100 per cent say that's a human, so I'm not going to tell you about it'." So, on Eberle's telling, it speaks while it is still unsure, and the speaking is not the end of it. "It'll tell the pilot, 'This is a person', and then we'll fly over and double-check that it is," Eberle said. Turner told ABC News what that looks like from the pilot's seat: "When the machine determines that it thinks it's a person or a vehicle or a vessel, it will ping and put a display on exactly where it thinks that person is." Nobody on that mountain was taking the machine's word for anything. They were taking its guesses seriously enough to go and look.
What changed, with evidence
Working the grid from the command post, the crew got their flag: the software had picked the pair out of the bush, roughly half a kilometer from the track, and the thermal camera zoomed in to confirm it. From the ground, the hikers were signaling too, holding up a mobile phone with a red light on it to pull the drone toward them in the dark. The operator answered with the drone's spotlight to point the ground crew at the spot, and police and SES volunteers used the aircraft's built-in speaker to talk to the pair before walking them off the mountain. Eberle's account has the ground teams taking about four hours to reach the pair after the find, and they were walked to safety around midnight. Both came off the mountain with mild exposure, and neither accepted treatment there. FRNSW called it a first-of-its-kind mission, and it was the first time the service's drone AI detection system had located a missing hiker. Eberle counts what it saved in days rather than hours: "It's definitely helped make what could have been a long-term incident into a very short-term incident." And on how else the night could have gone: "There's every chance in the world we could have still been out there."
The move worth copying
Almost nobody reading this is going to put a drone over a mountain at night, and the transferable part is smaller than the aircraft anyway. It is a habit about hedging. The instinct with any tool that reports a probability is to tune it up until it only speaks when it is certain, and on Eberle's account that is precisely the setting that would have reported nothing. The practice Eberle describes runs the other way: let the software flag what it half-sees, and send somebody to confirm it. The night belonged to a lot of people. The police who called for air support, the SES volunteers who walked in, the Jindabyne crew who flew, and two hikers who had the sense to hold up a light. Know a crew, a clinic, or a service that treats a machine's uncertainty as information instead of a fault? Feed the scout at goodinprogress.org.
"It means less time on the mountain and less time looking for people, and reduced risk so that the volunteers can get home to their families quicker" — Phillip Eberle, ABC News
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