Mahoning County Sheriff's Office using drones to help in the field
NORTH JACKSON, Ohio - On Thursday, drones were taking flight at Jackson Milton High School as the Mahoning County Sheriff's Office showed off the technology that's helping them in the field.
“It’s pretty cool,” Landon Workman, a junior at JMHS, said about seeing the drones.
The office’s drone program is known across Ohio. Their certified pilots use the drones in high stakes cases like hostage situations or to find missing people.
“Instead of sending in a person into a house we can send a drone into a house. Instead of putting somebody in an area where we’d be tromping through the woods … we’d have a drone that can go over (and) expedite a search,” Robert Hovanac, Deputy for the Mahoning County Sheriff's office said.
They’re also used in low-risk scenarios like for crowd control at the Canfield Fair.
Some of the drones are equipped with thermal cameras for officers to use when searching for a suspect at night.
“You can see that person and I can direct our assets, the dogs, the people, anything like that to go directly to that person,” Hovanac said.
It’s an advantage that makes things safer for the officers and takes suspects off the street faster.
“If we're chasing somebody or if they’re looking for somebody it used to take us a couple hours,” Hovanac said.
Jackson Milton High School offers a drone class as an elective for its students. In the class, they learn how to fly drones and have the opportunity to take the FAA license test to become a certified drone pilot.
“We’re using geography because we have to look at maps. They have to know weather and climate, physiography, they’re using physics because they’re talking about lift and drag on the drones. We’re using mass because we have to calculate density as we find out how the air is going to affect the drone,” Stephen Mohr, the drone program teacher at JMHS said about what is taught in the class.
The teachers hope that by showing the students what the department does with drones, it will encourage the highschoolers to get their pilot certificates and go into a career involving drones after graduation.
