AI-powered drone rescues lost hikers in record five hours

Two men in their twenties stepped off the walking trail in Kosciuszko national park on a Tuesday evening and did not come back. By 7pm, when they failed to appear at the rendezvous point, the alarm went up. Fire and Rescue NSW mobilized what would become a turning point in how the agency finds people lost in the backcountry: a drone equipped with artificial intelligence, thermal imaging, and a speaker system that could talk to the missing hikers in real time.

The men had been walking the Dead Horse Gap track, roughly 35 kilometres southwest of Jindabyne, when they wandered half a kilometre off the marked route. In the dark and cold, they were effectively invisible to conventional search methods. But they had one advantage: a mobile phone with a red light function. As the drone lifted into the night sky, the hikers used that small beam to signal upward, a human-made lighthouse in the dark. The drone's thermal imaging picked up their body heat against the cold ground.

What happened next was seamless in a way that would have been impossible just months earlier. The drone's built-in speaker allowed operators to communicate directly with the lost hikers. Its spotlight then guided ground rescue teams to the exact location. The entire operation, from the moment the men were reported missing to the moment they were found and brought to safety, took less than five hours. Both men were suffering only mild effects of exposure. They declined medical treatment.

Phillip Eberle, the Fire and Rescue inspector and regional duty commander for the NSW Alpine area, understood immediately what had just happened. He told the ABC that this technology had compressed what could easily have become a multi-day search into a single night operation. "There's every chance in the world we could have still been out there," he said. The drone's AI detection system had never been used for a rescue mission before. This was the first.

The implications rippled outward quickly. Eberle noted that faster rescues meant not just better outcomes for lost hikers, but reduced risk for the volunteers doing the searching. Fewer hours on the mountain in difficult conditions meant fewer opportunities for rescuers themselves to become casualties. "It means less time on the mountain and less time looking for people, and reduced risk so that the volunteers can get home to their families quicker," he said.

But the technology is still in its early stages, and Eberle's vision extends further. He imagines a future where drones do not simply locate stranded people but also deliver to them. Emergency supply packages dropped from the sky could keep someone warm and fed through the night, eliminating the need to send rescue teams into dangerous terrain in darkness. "We can save putting rescuers at risk overnight and drop a rescue pack to people so they're OK overnight, and be there first thing in the morning when it's safer for everyone," he told the ABC.

John Marzol, the Fire and Rescue commander, used the incident to reinforce a practical message: hikers heading into the snowfields should notify the National Parks and Wildlife Service before they go, and should register for free Personal Locator Beacons. Technology like the AI drone is powerful, but it works best when it does not have to search blind. The two men in their twenties walked out of Kosciuszko national park alive and largely unharmed, their names unrecorded in the reporting, their story now a data point in the growing case for what machines can do when humans are lost.