Discussions

Hi everyone,

I am volunteering with a search and rescue group looking for a downed US missionary pilot lost in the Venezuelan jungle. His name was Bob Norton and his aircraft went down two years ago with 7 total onboard.

You can read about the search effort here: www.findingbobnorton.org

The team has been down twice to search. We've conducted flight simulation and satelite imagery analysis to try to identify possible areas of interest where the the aircraft could be. 60 sites were visited which turned up nothing.

I've joined the team to provide the guidance and base station software etc.

My reason for posting is that we need advice on a sensor array, radar, even FLIR that might help us locate the aircraft. We're currently building a 12 foot Telemaster that will be our testing arial vehicle, with the intention of a longer endurance vehicle to take to Venezuela. Whether it be the longer endurance aircraft or the Telemaster, we need something that can be lifted with this size platform.

Does anyone have any experience? All we need is something that gives us some form or signal anomaly that I can map. The aircraft is a Cessna 182 that we are looking for. We have been donated a ruined Cessna that we have trucked to an area we'll be using for flight and sensor testing. We'll test flying over / around it and the surrounding area. This will help us sort out the algorithms needed and eliminate the UAV's interference / noise and basically allow us to tweak until we have a stable and reliable sensor.

If you have anything, any working knowledge and can help us in anyway, we'd be truly thankful. We've got a great team assembled, with a lot of experience in many different areas, we don't have experience with this though. We're all voluteers, we can't buy an expensive unit, we're looking for an ingenious and cheap idea to achieve sensing a large broken piece of aluminum in the jungle.

Happy flying and kind regards,

Edan Cain