Romania Unveils Groundbreaking Nighttime Patrolling Drone at European Ski Rescue Conference
Jerusalem, 6 March, 2025 (TPS-IL) -- Bucharest (Agerpres) – Gorj County mountain rescuers tested for the first time a nighttime patrolling drone that will surveil the ski slopes of the 1,600m high ski resort of Ranca, Sabin Cornoiu, head of the Romanian Mountain Rescue Service Salvamont told AGERPRES on Wednesday.
He said that the drone was presented at the 4th Ski Patrol European FIPS Meeting — the largest such event organized so far in Romania and the year’s largest in Europe in the field of mountain rescue — taking place March 3-6 in Sinaia.
“This European conference of ski slope rescuers is a special event meant to showcase the latest research in the field, and we are glad that Romania was chosen to host this event organized by Salvamont Romania, with the support of partners and local and county authorities,” Cornoiu said.
“It was a great success, for three days over 200 mountain rescuers from 16 European countries including a delegation from America met in Sinaia to debate specific issues of this activity, to present new rescue systems and – what is gratifying for us – we managed to introduce a groundbreaking high-tech invention, namely an automatic system for monitoring the slopes after they close, allowing us to see if there are people left on the piste so that we can intervene to recover them. The system proved to be a European first and we, Gorj residents, can proudly say that it was prepared, verified, tested and implemented for the first time for the Ranca ski resort,” he explained.
Cornoiu mentioned that this system will be implemented in other areas as well, pointing out that “it represents the future” and considerably eases the work of mountain rescuers.
“It’s a drone encased in a special hermetically sealed box. The drone takes off and returns to the box by itself, charges its batteries and is programmed to patrol a certain sector, at a certain time and transmit the data to the Mountain Rescue dispatch center, from where rescuers can pick the info and go after the person in trouble on the mountain. It features infrared/thermal vision surveillance, a high-tech drone which does its job by itself and manages to save a lot of human resources,” Cornoiu said.
“It certainly represents the future, everyone present at the conference realized that what we have achieved now is a big step forward and we will soon see this method implemented in many ski areas,” he added.
