What is everyone's opinion of a handheld FLIR unit for use by the Scanner? I'm thinking missing person searches.
http://www.flir.com/cs/emea/en/view/?id=42039 (http://www.flir.com/cs/emea/en/view/?id=42039)
What are the pros/cons?
Does anyone have experience with it?
Does anyone have a good unit to buy?
I just have two questions.
1. How much does it cost?
2. Who's going to pay for it?
In the case of the one indicated, $4-6K.
Like expensive cameras, the need is limited, and CAP could not afford to have one in every plane, so the odds of it being near where you need it
are low.
Not worth the cost. Now for a GT? Yeah that would be fine. Ive tried them at 500-1000ft AGL they would be useless. There is a reason the ones that go on aircraft are $300,000
Is FLIR really any good on the ground? I would think the limited field of view would severely limit its effectiveness.
on the ground they are actually pretty good. Even the resolution. When I worked patrol in a car, we had one we could check out. We would get up on top of a building in downtown at midnight - 0200 and just look around. You could see cats, people walking that you could see with you eyes. Ive also used them to clear fields vs walking through them. But you are right, the place for a FLIR is looking down, not across something.
The only thing is, you start putting that in a plane, at night flying 1000ft AGL or more is your actually searching at night and the quality starts to drop fast. Its like there is a sweet spot with the range. And once you exceed it, everything will look like a hot spot. Now, if you were flying along, it could definitely maybe spot a smoldering wreckage or something, but the field of view would be like looking through a rifle scope.
You know what though, I wonder if you called FLIR if they would send you one to demo for a few days? But it would have to come officially via CAP HQ, not Joe Blow SqCC. I have called FLIR a couple of times and they sent us a $600,000 system to play with for a week. And all I did was promise to send it back ;D But then again, that was an LE agency.
I have to agree with Flying Pig. I have used the handheld units extensively for such things as leak detection, surveying building envelopes and other things like that, but they just don't have the range and field of view to support air ops in my experience. Even GT use would be a stretch given the narrow FOV.
Also, they don't work well through plastic windows, but I suppose you could hand your head out the door like a happy Labrador.... There are a few CCTV Camera/ thermal imagers out there now that don't cost as much as they used to, and if you mounted it on the outside of the aircraft ( I know, don't start with me) with an NTSC of SVGA monitor, you could probably spot a (live) body from a few thousand feet above ground level. CAP is allergic to technology that works.
Major Lord
I have had great success with hand held thermal imagers in both aricraft and on the ground for search and rescue missions. We had the best success in the cold through open windows. Not comfertable for the aircrew, but they were able to move ground teams into several dear and other animals that were nested down and not visible under normal conditions. We did not find the subjects, but the thermal imager would not have helped in those incidents any way.