Firefighter Profile: Drone pilot Brett Chin Taking SFFD to New Heights

Sunset firefighter and drone pilot Brett Chin.

A man slipped and fell over the edge of the trail he was walking along above Baker Beach one evening last March. A San Francisco Fire Department rescue team raced to the scene. They could hear the man calling for help, but the rescue team had trouble spotting him in the dark.

What to do? The on-scene commander called for the fire department’s newest high-tech tool: an unmanned drone equipped with a sophisticated thermal-imaging camera and guided remotely by one of the department’s drone pilots.

“When the pilot at the scene flew the drone out over the cliff, its infrared imaging camera quickly picked up the heat image outline of the person,” says Brett Chin, a firefighter at Fire Station 18 in the Sunset and one of the fire department’s seven specially trained and FAA-licensed drone pilots.

The drone showed rescue climbers where to go down the cliff and the man was pulled to safety.

In recent years, fire departments around the world have added drones to their toolboxes, and now the SFFD has joined the trend. San Francisco began planning its drone program in 2020, but the pandemic delayed the launch until last November.

Since then, the drone has been used several times, including two cliff rescues. It also surveyed landslide damage near the Cliff House and evaluated the safety of a building on Franconia Street that was heavily damaged in a fire.

“Drones save time and energy and make firefighting safer,” says Chin, a four-year veteran of Station 18 whose main assignment is driving the hook and ladder truck. “If you’ve got a multi-alarm fire with smoke billowing from the roof, a drone’s thermal imaging can instantaneously show you, for example, how many people are on the roof. The drone can also give the chiefs in front of the building directing the firefighters a 360-degree view of all sides of the building.”

Currently, the SFFD has one high performance drone. With its four-foot wingspan, the big drone can fly up to 45 mph. It carries a five-pound payload and is equipped with a camera with a zoom lens, lighting for night flying, and the infrared imaging camera. The department is seeking federal funding for a second drone with even more advanced capabilities. SFFD also plans to increase the number of  firefighter-drone pilots. 

Every day, the drone is driven to one of the seven fire stations throughout the city with a licensed drone pilot. From there it is dispatched to incidents as requested by a battalion chief on scene.

“With more pilots, we’d really be up and running,” says Chin. “With two-man crews, one pilot could be flying the drone and watching the display screen while a second pilot could be keeping eyes on the drone itself.”

Once the department has more pilots, he thinks drones will be an “essential and every-day tool.”

Drones are used by hundreds of fire departments across the United States for firefighting, cliff rescues, searching for disaster victims, and fire-damage assessment. New York City has used drones for several years. And many states, including Alabama, use drones with thermal imaging to search for tornado victims.

Throughout California — especially in areas prone to wildfires — fire departments use drones to track the fires, as well as search for survivors. Menlo Park started its program in 2014 and operates several drones. They were used extensively to track the disastrous 2018 Carr fire near Redding, which destroyed more than 1,000 buildings and killed at least eight people, including three firefighters. 

In Europe and Asia, drones also are widely used. The London Fire Brigade and the Berlin Fire Department, for example, have been using drones since 2017. Drones have been used in Nepal, China, Pakistan and other countries to search for earthquake victims and survivors.

Police agencies worldwide also use drones, especially for crime scene surveillance and crowd monitoring.

Lt. Tom Fogle is a 23-year veteran firefighter who heads San Francisco’s drone program He notes that drone programs can be costly, depending on staffing levels and the number of drones and pilots being used. For example, some programs assign firefighters as full-time drone pilots.

“That is one of the most expensive models you can come up with,” Fogle says, “because it requires staffing every day. But it is also the preferred program model, as the response time of the drone is minimized to only a few minutes. There are also plenty of associated projects that would keep a team busy when they’re not responding to an incident.”

Operational data on the San Francisco drone program, including its cost and personnel needs, is now being collected by Fogle and Erica Arteseros, the assistant deputy chief for homeland security. That information will be evaluated by the department’s command staff to shape the final design of the program.

To address public concern about protecting citizens’ privacy, Fogle says a city commission for information technology oversight has drafted a plan that limits how drones deployed by city agencies can be used and how information they collect will be protected.

“People shouldn’t be worried that when they see a fire department drone flying around it’s being used for surveillance, because it’s not. That’s not its purpose,” Fogle says, “The drone has been extremely useful. It saved a lot of people time, and helped take a man out of the cold at night, saving him from a lot of distress.”

Reported and written by volunteer community journalist Tom Colin. We encourage retired journalists and student journalists in high school and college to volunteer as writers for Supervisor Engardio’s newsletter. Interested? Apply here. Do you know a story you would like to see featured in the newsletter? Tell us about it here.