Helicopters are really expensive, and require a lot of manpower.
>"Had we had not seen him then, the drone would have seen him a few minutes later since he was in the search area we were given to look at. If nothing else, the drone helped us cover a huge area in a short amount of time that would have taken many volunteers hours to search."
I think that the cheap and quick aspects of drones are really important here.
Even a small piston powered Robin helo is around $500 to operate per hour[1], and the smallest turbine powered ones are going to be around that figure just for the fuel: ~500 lb/h fuel consumption [2][3], JetA at > $6 / gallon [4].
So for one hour helo ops, you can purchase 2-3 parrot drones [5].
But you need to factor efficiency into that. If the top speed of the chopper is 100mph, versus 10mph for the drone. Then you can cover a much larger area quickly, furthermore a helicopter can stay up longer and has much greater range. So it's not enough to say a heli costs x/per hour therefore drones. Kind of like saying trash trucks are expensive, therefore we should replace them with wheel barrows.
From the article:
We were asked to search a large area of farmland with the drone. I covered three-quarters of it using three batteries, and the last quarter was a little too far for me to get good first-person view reception
Landing to change batteries every couple of minutes, is a serious blow to efficiency.
>"Had we had not seen him then, the drone would have seen him a few minutes later since he was in the search area we were given to look at. If nothing else, the drone helped us cover a huge area in a short amount of time that would have taken many volunteers hours to search."
I think that the cheap and quick aspects of drones are really important here.