Who is working on drone swarms for forest fire fighting?
The key metric is tonnes of water per unit time. A lot of small-ish drones flying loops could do as much as a fleet of planes.
If the drones are small enough, the hazard of one crashing and injuring drops.
You can also get moment-to-moment info on air conditions & turbulence above the fire from the previous drone that just dropped off its bucket on the blaze.
This article estimates the delivery cost of Zipline’s drone service at around 30/gal, compared to 12.33 for conventional approaches from this post.
I’m surprised there’s such a gap - maybe the delivery distance isn’t as far for water bombing so it’s not apples to apples? Or is this more a consequence of using batteries as the energy storage vs a hydrocarbon + onboard generator system.