EHang’s AAVs complete emergency response drills to show effectiveness at tackling high-rise building fires

EHang’s 216F — the com­pa­ny’s autonomous aer­i­al vehi­cle (AAV) designed for fire­fight­ing mis­sions — has been used by emer­gency depart­ments for the first time as part of a res­cue drill in Chi­na.

The mod­el was deployed along­side EHang’s flag­ship 216 mod­el and Fal­con B Series dur­ing the exer­cise in Laixi City, Qing­dao in the Shan­dong Province, which com­plet­ed high-rise fire­fight­ing and res­cue exer­cis­es. It fol­lows the 216F com­plet­ing a tech­ni­cal exam­i­na­tion set by the Chi­na Nation­al Fire-Fight­ing Equip­ment Qual­i­ty Super­vi­sion Test­ing Cen­tre.

The drill repli­cat­ed a high-rise fire sce­nario on a con­struc­tion site, where the Emer­gency Com­mand Bureau of Laixi City quick­ly dis­patched mul­ti­ple air­craft to pro­vide emer­gency air sup­port.

Each air­craft suc­cess­ful­ly com­plet­ed tasks such as fire detec­tion, aer­i­al broad­cast­ing, air­drop­ping emer­gency fire­fight­ing sup­plies, break­ing high-rise win­dows and extin­guish­ing fires, and res­cu­ing trapped per­sons. It also proved they are viable solu­tions to crit­i­cal pain points in urban high-rise fire­fight­ing which will help improve effi­cien­cy dur­ing emer­gency sit­u­a­tions.

Huazhi Hu, Founder, Chair­man and CEO of EHang, said: “The fire res­cue drill in Laixi city, Qing­dao, demon­strat­ed the prac­ti­cal util­i­sa­tion of EHang to sup­port smart city emer­gency response and fire­fight­ing man­age­ment in air fire­fight­ing and res­cue sce­nar­ios.

“In the future, this can be expect­ed as a fun­da­men­tal ele­ment in build­ing a life­line for more urban high-rise fire­fight­ing sce­nar­ios and pow­er the opti­mi­sa­tion of smart city emer­gency response and fire­fight­ing man­age­ment sys­tems.”

The fire drill is based on the authen­tic lack of capa­bil­i­ties in local high-rise emer­gency res­cue and fire­fight­ing forces, ful­ly demon­strat­ing the advan­tages of UAVs in high-rise res­cue, such as break­ing through space lim­i­ta­tions, rapid response, remote mon­i­tor­ing, clus­ter man­age­ment, mul­ti-machine link­age, and avoid­ing casu­al­ties. 

EHang has said its AAVs also sup­ple­ments the UAV emer­gency res­cue and fire­fight­ing force in Laixi City, help­ing to estab­lish an effi­cient uni­fied com­mand, prompt response, and order­ly coor­di­na­tion UAV emer­gency res­cue and fire­fight­ing link­age mech­a­nism.

This would pro­vide more accu­ra­cy for more effec­tive aux­il­iary deci­sion-mak­ing in han­dling emer­gen­cies and improve the over­all capa­bil­i­ties of urban emer­gency res­cue and fire­fight­ing forces.