Lake District mountain rescue team members helped to find a walker in the Highlands who had been missing for six weeks.
The Lake District Search and Mountain Rescue Association approached colleagues at Glencoe Mountain Rescue Team after extensive searches for the walker were scaled back after 10 days.
An association spokesman said: “It was a Herculean effort, involving multiple mountain rescue teams, Coastguard helicopters, RAF mountain rescue teams, search dogs, drones and police cell data analysis.
“In spite of the exhaustive efforts from all involved, and some encouraging signs – such as the finding of the missing person’s rucksack – Glencoe made the difficult decision to scale back their operations after 10 days of effort.”
The Lake District association made contact with the Glencoe team because its drone group had developed new, computer assisted search software for drones.
Members of Cockermouth and Duddon mountain rescue teams travelled to Glencoe when a weather window opened and launched the drones.
On the morning of October 24, the team deployed and began searching. The drone’s software autonomously covers an area, taking multiple photographs as it goes.
The spokesman said: “Each photo is overlapped, so objects that cannot be seen from one angle, can be spotted from another. After the drone lands, those photos are analysed by the software, which searches each image for unusually coloured clusters of pixels – things that don’t belong in the natural landscape.
“The anomalies are viewed by the team on the hill, so they can determine if any require further investigation.”
One of the two drone search teams reported a potential find in their area and the other team diverted their drone to the location of the anomaly and found the casualty.
The spokesman added: “The association’s drone teams join Glencoe Mountain Rescue Team and all other agencies in offering their condolences to the missing walker’s family.”
