How Drones Are Changing Emergency Response

Drones are arriving on scene before the fire trucks do.

David Bigelow has spent 20 years in fire and EMS. He is also a
commercial pilot and flight instructor who has been flying since
the late nineties. Today he flies Drone as First Responder
missions for a multi-agency program in Chesterfield County,
Virginia, where drone docks sit on school rooftops and launch to
911 calls in seconds.

This is what it looks like from the inside. Not the pitch deck
version.

David walks through how a call comes in, why the pilot is still
checking weather and airspace before anything launches, and why
he does not believe automation replaces the person making the go
or no-go decision. We get into transparency dashboards and the
fact that every flight his team makes is public record. The
Sweden save, where a drone put a defibrillator on scene ahead of
the ambulance and the patient survived. Rogue drones grounding
wildfire aircraft. The hundreds of drones federal teams seized
during the World Cup. And the gap nobody has closed yet: there is
still no clear playbook for what fire and EMS do when an eVTOL
comes down off-airport.

Then there is the line this whole channel is built on. Drones
stopped being a capability. They became infrastructure.

CONNECT WITH DAVID
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-bigelow-8433b79b/
Email: [email protected]

FOUNDERS AND FRIENDS
Marble Institute of Technology: https://marbletech.beehiiv.com/

Founders and Friends is a show about builders, dreamers, and the
delusionally optimistic. Hosted by Riley Rosebee.

*CHAPTERS*
00:00 Intro
02:04 Meet David Bigelow, Firefighter and Commercial Pilot
02:41 20 Years in Fire, EMS, and Aviation
03:22 How Fire Departments Actually Use Drones
04:03 Drone as First Responder: From Waivers to Infrastructure
04:54 Drone Docking Stations on School Rooftops
06:14 How a Multi-Agency DFR Program Gets Built
07:57 Drone Delivery of AEDs, Naloxone, and Trauma Kits
08:56 How DFR Works With 911 Dispatch
09:30 Why Automation Will Not Replace Drone Pilots
10:06 Drone Transparency: Every Flight Is Public Record
11:22 What the Public Actually Thinks About Police Drones
12:43 The Sweden AED Drone Save
13:15 Rogue Drones Are Grounding Wildfire Aircraft
14:56 Counter-UAS and the World Cup Drone Seizures
16:30 The Counter-Drone Market Opportunity
19:11 Why DFR Programs Share Everything
20:51 No One Has Written the eVTOL Crash Playbook
21:42 Will We Ever Get Autonomous Ambulances?
23:02 How to Start a DFR Program in Your Town
25:28 Has Drone First Response Hit the Tipping Point?
26:26 FAA Part 108 and the Future of Drone Delivery
27:24 The Military Funding Trap in eVTOL
28:10 BETA, Electra, and the Incremental Bet
30:53 Can AI Speed Up Aircraft Certification?
32:37 Digital Flight Rules and ADSPs Explained
35:23 Why Drones Took So Long to Arrive
36:19 What Automation Cannot Replace: Aviation Judgment
38:41 Advancing Aviation in Service of Community

Views expressed by guests are their own.