Wildfire Ahead does not authorize, dispatch or control any flight. Aviation authority rests with the operating agency and the applicable regulator.

Drone OperationsWildfire Ahead
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What is built

Built, simulated, designed, gated

The complete inventory of the drone subsystem, including the parts that do not exist. A page like this is unusual, which is exactly why it is here: anyone can publish the first three categories.

The vocabulary

Built— Working code you can run today.

Working code. Runs today, against real inputs.

Simulated— Runs against synthetic data, never a real aircraft.

Runs today against synthetic data. No aircraft involved.

Designed— The contract is specified and reviewed. It is not built yet.

Contract specified and reviewed. Not implemented.

Gated— Blocked on an approval only a regulator or agency can give.

Blocked on an approval only a regulator or agency can give.

"Coming soon" appears nowhere on this site. It is banned by our own publication rules, because it is the phrase that lets a roadmap read as a product.

Flight planning and safety

  • Built— Working code you can run today.

    Route file validation

    Uploaded route archives are checked for archive path traversal, entry count, expanded size, compression ratio, XML structure, namespace, template and coordinate validity before anything reads them. A malformed or hostile file is rejected with the specific reason.

  • Built— Working code you can run today.

    Fail-closed preflight assessment

    Route, schedule, altitude, weather, restriction, battery reserve and operator approval are assessed independently against explicitly synthetic inputs. The most permissive output is 'ready for human release'.

  • Built— Working code you can run today.

    Corridor conflict review

    Time-coincident route segment pairs are reported with approximate horizontal separation and overlap interval, for human contention review only. This is not flight-grade deconfliction and is not detect-and-avoid.

  • Built— Working code you can run today.

    Recovery option comparison

    Return-to-home and diversion options are compared against synthetic battery reserves, route envelopes and declared site capacity. The system never selects an option and never sends a device command.

  • Gated— Blocked on an approval only a regulator or agency can give.

    Flight-grade geodesy and deconfliction

    Current geometry uses a local equirectangular projection and simplified altitude envelopes. Reviewed geodesy, terrain and obstacle data, uncertainty and contingency volumes and authoritative airspace integration all require independent verification before any operational use.

The protocol twin

  • Simulated— Runs against synthetic data, never a real aircraft.

    Deterministic dock and aircraft twin

    A behavioural stand-in for a bounded cloud API subset: seeded scenarios, a virtual clock, request/reply/event flows, fault injection and multi-device, multi-dock handoff. It never contacts a manufacturer, accepts no manufacturer credentials and produces no external effect.

  • Built— Working code you can run today.

    Replayable receipts

    Every assessment produces a receipt that can be replayed to detect whether an input or the policy identity changed since. An answer that cannot be re-derived is not evidence.

  • Built— Working code you can run today.

    Versioned capability profiles

    Two dock and aircraft combinations are declared with their firmware-versioned capabilities. A mission against an unknown combination is rejected rather than attempted.

  • Gated— Blocked on an approval only a regulator or agency can give.

    Hardware-in-the-loop qualification

    Passing simulator tests establishes nothing about radio performance, GNSS/RTK, aircraft separation, dock mechanics, battery behaviour, thermal radiometry or LiDAR accuracy. This needs a controlled hardware environment and qualified operators.

Evidence and integration

  • Built— Working code you can run today.

    Deterministic sensor and media fixtures

    Visible, thermal-like and LiDAR metadata fixtures with explicit synthetic provenance, upload leases whose credentials never cross the backend boundary, and callback checksum reconciliation with duplicate suppression.

  • Designed— The contract is specified and reviewed. It is not built yet.

    The seam to the wider platform

    Ranked observation needs flow outward as proposals; captured observations flow back as evidence. Evidence in both directions, authority in neither. Specified and reviewed; not implemented.

  • Designed— The contract is specified and reviewed. It is not built yet.

    Vendor-neutral drone and sensor adapters

    The ports are specified. One manufacturer adapter exists. A second is what turns neutrality from a design property into a demonstrated one, and it does not exist yet.

  • Designed— The contract is specified and reviewed. It is not built yet.

    Priority ranking of where to look

    The method for combining ignition probability, candidate uncertainty, downwind consequence, time since last observation and whether observation was even possible. Nothing computes this surface today.

Operating on a real incident

  • Gated— Blocked on an approval only a regulator or agency can give.

    Aviation authorization

    Transport Canada CARs 601.15–601.17, FAA authorization and incident-specific agency approval. Every aviation gate in the programme is open. No software here substitutes for any of them.

  • Gated— Blocked on an approval only a regulator or agency can give.

    A human release transaction

    A signed, short-lived, single-use artifact binding current approvals, aircraft configuration, route digest, source evidence, operator, site and time window. Designed at the contract level, deliberately not implemented until the operating concept that governs it is approved.

  • Gated— Blocked on an approval only a regulator or agency can give.

    Independent scientific and safety review

    An agent cannot review its own work and call the review independent. Fire science, security, privacy and human-factors reviews are all outstanding.

What would change our minds about any of this

Every "designed" item becomes "built" when its acceptance test passes, not when someone decides it feels done. Every "gated" item stays gated until a named authority outside this project acts — and no release, demo or commercial pressure moves one. If you find a claim on this site that outruns this table, tell us: that is a defect, and we would treat it as one.

Wildfire Ahead Drone Operations

Aerial evidence for wildfire decisions. Part of the Wildfire Ahead platform for Canada and the United States.

Imagery and footage on this site are licensed stock. No photograph or video here shows Wildfire Ahead equipment, personnel or operations, and no wildfire shown was detected, predicted or responded to by this platform. Screens shown from the development console display synthetic data.