Drone search and rescue cover in Budleigh Salterton

East of the pebble beach, the Otter estuary opens into a nature reserve of reed beds, mud and slow-moving water, with wooded slopes rising sharply behind the high street on the landward side. Reed beds are disorientating to move through on foot: tracks curve back on themselves, the reeds close overhead in places, and it becomes properly difficult to keep a sense of which direction leads back out once you're a few metres in.

From height, that same ground reads completely differently. The channels, patches of open water and firmer paths through the reeds are all visible at once, and a shape or colour that doesn't belong stands out against the reed bed far faster than it would to someone working through it at ground level, one section at a time.

A search around Budleigh Salterton most often centres on the estuary reserve itself, someone reported missing near the reed beds or the Otter's mud, or on the wooded ground behind the town where paths on the East Devon Way climb quickly into dense tree cover. Both are slow going for a foot team working blind through vegetation, and much faster to narrow down by air first.

The beach and open water in front of the town are exposed to the south and south-west, with no real shelter from the sea, so a beach-based search or a safety sweep ahead of a busy weekend has to work with whatever conditions the coast is giving on the day, rather than waiting for calmer weather that may not come.

The Octagon and the streets running down to the beach give a compact, well-known centre to brief from before a search spreads out either toward the estuary reserve or up into the wooded ground behind the town, so the direction a flight takes first can be decided quickly rather than worked out on the spot.

The thermal camera is particularly useful over the reed beds and estuary margins, where a heat signature stands out clearly against cold water and vegetation, cutting down the time it takes to rule an area in or out compared with a team wading through reeds and soft mud by hand.

Working alongside the police or a search coordinator, the aim is straightforward: check the reed beds, the estuary edges and the wooded slopes behind the town quickly, and pass back a clear picture of where a foot team's time is best spent next.

The wooded ground behind the high street rises sharply enough that a foot search there means a genuine climb, not just a walk, and the East Devon Way path through it can be easy to lose sight of once someone has stepped off it into the trees either side. Flying that slope first, before committing a team to the climb, gives a coordinator a sense of whether the effort is worth spending there before anyone starts up the hill.