It can be a harrowing experience for both family and police responders whenever a child is reported missing. Fortunately, most such situations are solved rapidly and happily.
Such was the case just recently in north Devon in the U.K when a six-year-old girl disappeared from her home in the evening, and her parents called for police assistance.
The distraught parents called Devon and Cornwall Police shortly after 9:30 pm and rapidly arrived at a rural property in the Umberleigh area. Immediately upon confirming the details of the little girl’s disappearance, a large and thorough search was organized with the help of several search units and police dog handlers.
Most crucially though, as it turned out, one of the helicopters used by the National Police Air Service (NPAS) South West arm was quickly dispatched to also help seek the child in the surrounding countryside.
It’s through this effort by the police search rescue helicopter services of National Police Air Service that the girl was found little more than an hour later, completely unharmed close to a grove of trees in a field just over half a mile from her home. She was even asleep when located.
The NPAS helicopter not only found the girl extremely quickly but also managed to do so in complete darkness through the use of an onboard infrared camera system that easily identified her sleeping form in the field where she had decided to lay down.
As the attending NPAS officials explain, she was “Located in the pitch dark by our helicopter crew using their infrared camera system.” They however also comment that the overall search was a “massive team effort, from the police control room, the police officers on the ground and the officers in the air”.
NPAS South West Region officials nonetheless couldn’t help but show off their own effective work on social media. They shortly afterward released a video on their Twitter feed showing the exact moment in which the toddler is found by the helicopter crew and their specialized search camera.
This lucky break is even more remarkable because the IR video shows the similar-looking heat signatures of resting farm animals scattered throughout surrounding fields. These could have easily confused things in a less thorough search and caused rescuers to entirely miss the girl’s presence.
Search rescue helicopter services from both police emergency responders and private air charter companies such as Fair Lifts regularly conduct operations such as the one that brought this particular case to a happy conclusion.