The SMT has donated £4,000 to help Scottish mountain rescuers get another state-of-the art drone. The grant went to the Search and Rescue Aerial Association (SARAA-Scotland) – the mountain search and rescue charity that trains people to pilot a drone on mountain rescues.
Drones have proven to be extremely useful in mountain rescue in many ways. These include being used to aid communications; to provide visual oversight of an incident area; to look into very difficult steep ground/gullies safely; or even to deliver small items of equipment. A drone can also help keep MR team members safe, by searching or assessing steep or difficult ground and providing lighting at night.
SARAA has been working since 2018. In those years it has trained 26 pilots, and has four currently in training. Importantly, every pilot it trains is already an MR team member: drone piloting is something added to their core skills. The trained pilots are members of 12 Scottish MR teams
SARAA currently owns 11 drones, and some of its pilots, or their teams, have their own machines. But many of these aircraft can’t be upgraded to keep up with recent advances in design.
The new drone model it has chosen to buy, the DJI M4T/D, will bring big advances across the spectrum. And at the time of writing it had already been delivered!
Its lenses enable searches by night, and in cloudy weather, and can provide thermal as well as visual imaging. On top of this. the M4T/D is waterproof. Being able to search in cloud, in rain and at night, SARAA chair Darryl Ashford-Smith told us, “ it will make a huge difference to what we are capable of”. It can also carry a loudspeaker so the team can communicate with the casualty whether on the ground or cragfast.
The drone can also use AI to detect casualties that a normal camera, or the human eye, can’t “see”, for example because they blend with the background terrain. Darryl said this would be especially helpful in historical searches, where people reported missing in the mountains have never been found: “We consider this task extremely important for the family of the deceased, for closure.” SARAA expect to use this in several ongoing searches for long-term missing persons.
The Trust has helped many mountain rescue teams over the years, with needs ranging from stretchers to team bases to transceivers and beacons. The teams’ areas stretch from the Borders to Assynt and the Hebrides, and the grants given to mountain rescue came to £37,000 in the year 2025 alone.
To help SARAA-Scotland, mail fundraising@saraa-scotland.org.uk, or check them on LinkedIn and Facebook.
