Drone Swarms vs Wildfires with Early Intervention from Above
Wildfires are no longer rare disasters – they’ve become a summer certainty in many parts of the world, from the mountains of California to the islands of Greece. Blistering heat waves and drought, exacerbated by climate change, are turning forests into tinderboxes.
In 2023, more than half a million hectares burned across the EU – an area twice the size of Luxembourg. Greece endured one of Europe’s largest-ever wildfires, with flames scorching over 810 square kilometres in the Evros region. In a single week that summer, wildfires killed 21 people in Greece, and a 2018 blaze near Athens claimed over 100 lives.
The story is similar globally: unprecedented infernos in Canada blanketed US cities in smoke, while blazes raged in Italy, Spain, Australia, and beyond. Firefighters are stretched to their limits and traditional methods are struggling to keep up.
As investor Dror Berman noted: “Losses from catastrophic wildfires are increasing at unprecedented rates, and at the same time, our emergency responders are left fighting these fires in the same way they have been for the last 50 years.” In other words, the wildfire crisis is accelerating, but firefighting tactics haven’t changed much in decades.
This stark reality has sparked a innovative solution: could high-tech swarms of drones be the game-changer that helps snuff out wildfires before they explode out of control?
Drone Firefighting Swarms for Early Intervention
Faced with the worsening wildfire threat, engineers and emergency services are turning to technology for solutions. One promising idea is the deployment of drone firefighting swarms – networks of unmanned aerial vehicles that can detect, attack, and monitor wildfires far faster than traditional crews. The concept is simple in theory: station fleets of large drones at strategic high-risk areas, ready to launch at the first sign of smoke. These aren’t hobbyist toys, but industrial-grade drones, similar in size to agricultural spraying UAVs or even larger.
Each drone can carry a limited payload of fire suppressant – specialized retardant chemicals or water mix – rather than huge water volumes. Individually they carry only tens of litres, but as a coordinated swarm they can deliver multiple targeted drops up close to douse a nascent fire before it spreads.
What makes a swarm of drones so powerful is speed and intelligence. Using artificial intelligence and thermal cameras, an autonomous drone network can scan vast forests for hot spots or smoke plumes in real time.
“When you have a set number of days where the temperature and humidity levels are at a certain point, you know that the likelihood of a fire is much higher… on days [of] high likelihood…the fire-fighting team would deploy a large number of [drones], a swarm, above an area seen as high-risk to monitor and look for small fire outbreaks,” explains Nickolay Jelev of UK-based drone firm Windracers.
In practice, that means on sweltering, windy days – when sparks from a powerline or a lightning strike could ignite a blaze – a fleet of smaller surveillance drones might already be patrolling the skies over a tinder-dry region. The moment a potential fire is detected, whether by onboard thermal sensors, satellite alert or a call to emergency services, the firefighting drones can converge on the location within minutes. Flying autonomously in coordinated formation like a swarm of bees, they surround the flame. Some drones distribute fire-retardant from different angles, while others hover on the perimeter scanning for escaping embers.
Critically, this all can happen far quicker than mobilizing ground crews or diverting water-bombing planes. Instead of waiting for a fire to grow large enough to deploy expensive aircraft, drones could nip it in the bud.
“The challenge from an environmental protection point of view is how do you stop wildfires from developing into the uncontrollable phenomena that are very difficult to put out,” Jelev said.
By attacking a fire in its first few minutes, a drone swarm aims to prevent it from exploding into the kind of inferno that imperils towns and firefighters alike. And if the blaze does manage to spread, the drones can keep working continuously – even through the night or heavy smoke – tasks too dangerous or impossible for manned aircraft. They can return to their base or a mobile truck platform to automatically swap out their payload for new fuel and suppressant, then take off again in quick succession, creating a continuous relay of aerial firefighting. It’s a high-tech twist on the bucket brigade: many small payloads delivered rapidly and precisely, guided by live data.
Early Detection and Surveillance
Of course, rapid response is only useful if you know exactly where a fire starts. That’s why early detection is the other half of the drone swarm equation. Traditional wildfire surveillance – watchtower lookouts, emergency calls, or satellite images that update only every few hours – often catches fires when they’re already growing. New systems aim to change that.
In Greece, for example, authorities have nearly doubled their fleet of fire-surveillance drones to 82 in the past two years, deploying them as roving sentinels over vulnerable forests. These drones feed live thermal imaging to command centres, allowing firefighters to spot and locate small blazes in rough terrain within minutes. Greek Fire Chief Theodoros Vagias stresses the importance of such tools in an era of climate extremes: “The climate crisis is here to stay, and we must be more effective in surveillance, preparedness, and how we mobilize our resources,” Vagias said.
Constant aerial surveillance, aided by AI that can recognize smoke signatures or unusual heat patches, means responders can get an earlier warning than ever before.
It’s not just government agencies investing in drone monitoring – local communities and start-ups are joining in. In the Athens suburbs, residents recently pooled funds to hire a company with long-range drones that patrol their woodlands with thermal cameras each evening, acting as an early-warning system to catch fires before they spread. And in the United States, a Bill Gates-backed start-up called Data Blanket is developing AI-powered drone teams that autonomously scout wildfire zones and beam back real-time imagery to incident commanders.
One fire chief who saw a demo told Data Blanket’s CEO: “You just made my firefighters 400-feet tall.” That quip captures the transformative potential of drones: they give firefighters a literal bird’s-eye view, heightening their reach and awareness. A swarm of just four drones can survey a two-mile radius in minutes, mapping the fire’s position and even creating live 3D maps of the terrain so crews know which areas are burning and which routes are safe. With drones acting as airborne lookouts and data scouts, human firefighters can make faster, smarter decisions – often the difference between a minor bush fire and a major disaster.
Drones That Fight Fire with Fire (Retardant)
Once a nascent fire is pinpointed, speed is everything. This is where the drone swarm truly shows its mettle. Imagine a remote hillside where a lightning strike has ignited dry scrub. In a conventional scenario, ground crews might take an hour to hike in, and water-bomber planes (if available) might take time to arrive and must break off by nightfall.
Now picture a different response: An alert is triggered within minutes by an overhead drone or a satellite; from a nearby drone base – essentially an automated hangar or a fire truck equipped with drone launchpads – several UAVs scramble into the air. Guided by GPS and thermal homing, the first drones on scene release quick bursts of retardant chemical, forming a wet containment line around the small flame. Others spray suppressant foam directly onto the hottest spots, while additional drones circle with infrared cameras to ensure the fire’s edges aren’t spreading.
In essence, the swarm attacks the fire collectively, hitting it with many small doses of suppressant in a tactical pattern designed to smother flames and soak any surrounding brush that might ignite.
Because these drones are unmanned, they can fly in conditions too risky for human pilots. High winds, dense smoke, or night-time darkness – factors that often ground water-bombing planes and helicopters – are less of an obstacle. Powerful onboard processors and swarm AI algorithms (some inspired by how flocks of birds or bees communicate) let the drones adjust their formation on the fly, avoid collisions, and concentrate where the fire is fiercest. For example, if the wind shifts the fire, the drones can sense the change in heat pattern and re-position themselves to contain spotting embers that jump ahead. Every second counts in early wildfire control, and a well-coordinated drone team can execute dynamic manoeuvres faster than a commander could relay new orders to multiple crews on the ground.
Another advantage is endurance through rapid turnaround. Drones can return to base for a fresh battery and suppressant refill in a matter of minutes. While one set of drones is enroute back to reload, another set can take over in a seamless rotation. This “tag-team” approach means an aggressive initial attack can be sustained as long as needed to extinguish the threat. In effect, drone swarms aim to fill a crucial gap in wildfire response: those first 30, 60, 90 minutes of a fire, when a fast, targeted strike can prevent a catastrophe. Rather than replacing water bomber planes or firefighters, these autonomous aircraft would augment them – containing blazes while they’re small, and providing reconnaissance and backup support to keep firefighters safer and more effective.
Tech to the Rescue in Greece and Beyond
What sounds like a futuristic vision could quickly become reality through pilot projects around the world. In Greece, which has been hard-hit by wildfires in recent years, authorities are embracing drone technology on multiple fronts. Along with expanding their surveillance drone fleet, Greek officials ran a large-scale exercise in 2025 called “Through Fire” to test integrating drones into wildfire response. In the drill, fire crews on the ground watched live drone video feeds on tablets as they coordinated water drops from planes – a clear indication that real-time drone intelligence is now part of Greece’s evolving playbook.
Greece is also hosting expertise from abroad: some 300 firefighters from across Europe were pre-positioned in Greece during fire season as part of an EU program, and they brought additional drones and mobile command tech with them. Even local volunteers are taking initiative – the suburban drone patrols around Athens are one grassroots example of communities using innovation to protect themselves when every second matters.
Meanwhile, in the UK, an experimental project by Windracers has been pushing the envelope on autonomous fire-fighting swarms. Windracers’ large fixed-wing drones, originally designed for cargo, have been retooled to carry firefighting payloads and operate in groups. In tests with the Lancashire Fire and Rescue Service, the company demonstrated how a fleet of its 450-kg Ultra drones could work together autonomously over vast areas. Their simulations showed that 20–30 of these aircraft could cover an area the size of California, scanning for fires and responding to outbreaks with onboard retardant dispensers. Notably, Windracers has involved the Hellenic Fire Service of Greece in its research programs, sharing knowledge between countries on the forefront of wildfire battles. The project has gained so much momentum that Windracers’ environmental team was selected as a finalist in the global XPRIZE Wildfire competition, vying to prove its system in real wildfire scenarios in 2025–26. Such international collaborations underscore that drone swarms aren’t science fiction – they’re a serious part of the future toolkit for firefighting agencies.
Across the Atlantic, in the United States, tech start-ups and government labs are testing their own drone strategies. Data Blanket’s approach focuses on small AI-guided drones for rapid wildfire reconnaissance, backed by big-name investors and operating “pilotless” swarms to map fires and predict their next moves. Other companies are tackling the challenge of payload capacity – for instance, a team in Portugal developed the Sap drone, a lightweight quadcopter that can douse wildfires by shooting a steady stream of water from a tethered hose attached to a portable pump. And in the Pacific Northwest, agencies have used drones for controlled burns and even reseeding forests after fires, pointing to a broad ecosystem of UAVs in wildfire management. The trend is clear: from Australia to Spain, investment in firefighting drones is surging. Market analysts predict the global market for firefighting drone swarms will grow rapidly each year. With each summer bringing harrowing images of flames and smoke-choked skies, there’s a palpable urgency driving this innovation.
“Data Blanket is bringing firefighting, and ultimately wildfire management, into the digital age,” Berman said, reflecting a wider confidence that tech disruption can make a life-or-death difference on the fireline.
Making Firefighting Drone Swarms a Reality
Turning the concept of firefighting drone swarms into reality will require coordinated efforts worldwide, along with significant funding and policy support.
Governments and international bodies can tap climate and disaster resilience funds to drive this innovation. For example, the World Bank’s Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery has already supported programs to procure drone-based wildfire early warning systems in countries like Argentina.
Similarly, the UN’s climate initiatives are backing early warning technology – the Green Climate Fund is helping launch a global initiative with over $150 million aimed at universal early-warning coverage. Dedicated climate innovation programmes and disaster risk reduction funds (from entities like the UN, World Bank and regional development banks) could provide grants or low-interest financing to develop and deploy firefighting drone swarms in high-risk regions.
Private and philanthropic actors are also pitching in: the XPRIZE foundation, for instance, has a new $11 million XPRIZE Wildfire competition to spur breakthrough technologies for autonomous wildfire detection and suppression. These multi-source funding avenues highlight a growing recognition that new solutions are needed for escalating wildfire threats.
Europe is one region already mobilising resources in this direction. The EU’s Horizon Europe research programme is a natural springboard for funding drone swarm development – over the past two decades, more than 60 EU-funded projects have invested upwards of €100 million in wildfire-related research and innovation. Some of these projects directly explore high-tech firefighting: the ongoing TREEADS consortium, launched under Horizon, brings together partners from 14 countries (including across Europe and beyond) to develop an integrated wildfire response system.
TREEADS is testing a four-tier approach – from low-altitude drones and mid-altitude unmanned craft dropping fire retardant, up to high-altitude balloons and satellite surveillance – with field trials across eight countries starting in 2024.
At the operational level, Europe’s Union Civil Protection Mechanism (and its rescEU reserve) offers a blueprint for pooling resources. This mechanism has already coordinated multinational firefighting deployments – in summer 2023 the EU dispatched over ten water-bomber aircraft, 500 firefighters and 100 vehicles to help quell fires in Greece, alongside support to Cyprus and even Tunisia. Incorporating drone swarms into this framework could be the next step, augmenting traditional water bombers with rapid, smart surveillance and suppression from the air.
Notably, EU officials are doubling down on preparedness: programmes like Horizon Europe’s 2025 calls include hundreds of millions of euros for disaster resilience and new technologies, which drone swarm projects could readily target. And beyond funding, the EU is fostering networks for collaboration – the FIRE-RES initiative, for example, operates “living labs” where firefighters, scientists and tech developers jointly trial innovations such as drone-based early warning systems in real wildfire conditions.
Successful implementation will depend on public–private partnerships and cross-disciplinary teamwork. Already, initiatives like FIRE-RES show the value of bringing first responders and researchers together to co-develop solutions.
Key stakeholders and their roles include:
- Drone manufacturers and tech companies – designing robust, fire-resistant UAVs and swarm software tailored to wildfire operations, and scaling up production.
- Wildfire scientists and forestry experts – providing data on fire behaviour and ecology to guide drone deployment strategies, and validating the effectiveness of new systems.
- Fire brigades and emergency services – hosting pilot trials, training crews to integrate swarms into active firefighting, and offering feedback from the front lines to refine the technology.
- Policymakers and regulators – establishing supportive policies (from streamlined airspace permissions for emergency drones to safety standards), earmarking funding or incentives for adoption, and facilitating international agreements so that drone units can be shared across borders during crises.
Equally important are concrete pilot projects and partnerships to demonstrate the technology’s value. Stakeholders can launch joint trials in fire-prone regions – for instance, a public-private pilot programme in the Mediterranean or California could deploy a swarm of firefighting drones during peak fire season to gauge their impact. International and inter-agency collaboration will amplify results: one country’s fire service might partner with a drone manufacturer and an academic lab, while drawing on funding from an EU Horizon grant or a UN climate resilience programme.
Such collaborations not only test the technical feasibility of drone swarms but also build the operational playbooks and trust needed for wider rollout. Policymakers can support these efforts by using mechanisms like the EU Civil Protection Mechanism or the UN’s disaster response networks to share data, expertise, and even equipment among countries.
In fact, several real-world initiatives could serve as stepping stones. The EU’s aforementioned TREEADS project is one, and its multinational approach could be replicated in other regions. In Australia, wildfire experts have called for heavy government investment in technologies like firefighting drones and AI detection after recent catastrophic fires. In Canada, provincial authorities have begun investing in local drone companies to boost wildfire monitoring capacity. These examples show a growing appetite for innovation. By building on such efforts – connecting the dots between government funding, industry innovation, and emergency-sector know-how – the concept of autonomous firefighting swarms can move from theory to practice.
Ultimately, a coordinated global push can accelerate drone swarms from experimental prototypes to a standard tool in wildfire management. This means aligning financial support with on-the-ground experimentation: climate and resilience funds channelled into drone pilots, matched with private sector R&D, and guided by wildfire professionals. If a coalition of policymakers, investors and first responders works together, within a few years we could see drone swarms aiding firefighters worldwide – detecting ignitions faster, attacking hotspots in tandem with water bombers, and keeping personnel out of harm’s way.
Such a development would not only revolutionise how we fight fires but also strengthen international cooperation against a shared climate-fuelled threat. The opportunity is there for global collaboration to literally take flight – turning high-tech firefighting swarms into a life-saving reality.
Challenges and the Road Ahead
For all their promise, deploying swarms of drones to fight fires at scale is not without hurdles. Regulation is a significant one: in many countries, flying multiple large drones beyond the operator’s line of sight (especially in disaster conditions) is tightly controlled by aviation authorities. Companies like Data Blanket have been working with regulators on special waivers to operate swarms freely and to fly BVLOS (Beyond Visual Line of Sight) during wildfires.
There’s also the task of making sure drones don’t interfere with traditional firefighting aircraft – airspace over an active wildfire can be crowded and dangerous. Typically, when water bombers or helicopters are scooping and dropping water, all other aircraft (including drones) must stay clear to avoid collisions. This has driven the development of robust communication systems: advanced drone networks can broadcast their positions and even set up ad-hoc 5G/WiFi networks to remain connected with commanders and manned aircraft.
The goal is to integrate drones so seamlessly that an incident commander can treat them as just another set of tools, like fire engines or bulldozers – not a complication. “It’s essential… that the tech can smoothly integrate into existing management systems,” notes George Geissler, a state wildfire operations chief in Washington. He cautions that firefighters shouldn’t be overwhelmed with too much data or gadgetry in the heat of battle. To address this, developers are focusing on user-friendly interfaces – for example, presenting drone data through simple dashboards and using AI to filter useful insights, so crews get clearer situational awareness, not information overload.
Another challenge is scalability and durability. Wildfires often occur in remote, mountainous terrain with high winds, extreme temperatures, and lots of smoke – a punishing environment for any aircraft. Drones need to be rugged and powerful, with heavy-lift propulsion to carry sufficient retardant and batteries that can endure long missions or high heat. Some designs, like heavy lift octocopters or unmanned mini-helicopters, are in testing to increase payload capacity and flight time.
There’s ongoing research into using tethered drones that could plug into portable power or water sources on the ground, enabling continuous spraying without recharging. And of course, deploying drone bases at every fire-prone location is a logistical and financial challenge. It requires investment in infrastructure – from drone docking stations (possibly solar-powered in remote areas) to maintenance crews and training programs to teach firefighters how to operate alongside autonomous systems. Yet, these challenges are being met with growing political and financial will, especially as each devastating fire season drives home the high cost of inaction.
Policymakers are starting to view firefighting drones as a worthwhile investment that could save not only lives and property but also reduce the enormous economic losses from mega-fires. For instance, the European Union is funding cross-border initiatives to share drone data and technology among member states, and major drone manufacturers are tailoring some of their industrial models for firefighting use.
In short, there’s momentum to resolve the kinks – from refining swarm AI and better retardant formulas for small drops, to crafting new laws that let fleets of robots fly where they need to when the emergency calls.
A High-Tech Horizon for Wildfire Fighting
Every year, the wildfire season grows more intense – but so does human ingenuity in fighting back. The emergence of drone swarms could mark an inflection point in how we think about wildfire response. What was once the stuff of science fiction – autonomous aircraft teaming up to battle flames – could fast become a practical reality on the frontlines.
The use of small surveillance drones to monitor wildfires suggests that, with the right support, drone swarms could also dramatically improve our ability to catch fires early and attack them hard before they rage out of control. The approach is not a silver bullet; there will always be massive fires that require all the traditional tools and teamwork. But even if drones can prevent a handful of small fires from turning into the next record-breaking inferno, the impact will be huge. As climate change continues to raise the stakes, embracing innovation is no longer optional – it’s imperative.
From the pine forests of Greece to the plains of California, firefighters could soon have an armada of autonomous helpers overhead, fighting flames alongside them. It’s a vision of man and machine in cooperation against a common foe. And it’s giving hope that the tragedy of wildfires can be mitigated with faster, smarter responses.
As developers fine-tune these systems and agencies gear up to deploy them, a new era in firefighting is on the horizon – one where swarming drones guard the forests and leaps in technology help prevent the kind of devastation we’ve too often seen. “The crisis in wildfires… is so intense that it’s around the clock… I really hope we can deliver in a way that makes a difference,” says Data Blanket CEO Omer Bar-Yohay, expressing a sentiment shared by many in this burgeoning field.
That difference could mean safer summers, more resilient communities, and forests that don’t have to burn as ferociously before help arrives. In the face of mounting wildfire threats, drone firefighting swarms offer a bold, brand-agnostic beacon of innovation – one that just might help turn the tide in humanity’s battle against nature’s most fearsome flames.
This article was inspired by an original concept developed by the author, while living in Crete and witnessing first-hand the devastation caused by Mediterranean wildfires. Recognising the urgency for smarter, faster wildfire responses, Anthony envisioned the use of large coordinated drone swarms – powered by modular payloads and supported by mobile refuelling units – as a means of rapid intervention and sustainable fire control. This article explores how that vision could take shape on the global stage.
