A small uncrewed aircraft carrying an uncooled longwave thermal camera and a visible camera flies a programmed grid over a fire area, and the frames are stitched into a georeferenced thermal mosaic. It fills a gap no other platform covers: it can launch in minutes, fly low enough to resolve individual hot spots at tens of centimetres, and work at night, when crewed aircraft are often grounded and when the thermal contrast between residual heat and cool ground is greatest. That makes it the standard tool for mop-up, finding smouldering stumps and buried heat inside a supposedly controlled perimeter, and for rapid perimeter updates on small incidents. The constraints are as sharp as the capability. Endurance is typically twenty to forty minutes per battery, so mapped area per sortie is small; smoke columns, heat and wind above a fire are genuinely hazardous to a light airframe; and flight over an incident requires deconfliction with crewed firefighting aircraft. After this Concept you can say what a drone thermal survey delivers that a satellite or a tower cannot, and what area one flight actually covers.
Automated post-fire aerial survey combines perimeter delineation, structured route planning (area versus linear/perimeter coverage patterns), and dual-sensor (visible plus thermal infrared) data coll…