It is 06:00 and I'm meeting drone pilot Pete Short for a dawn patrol in the Cairngorms National Park. It is a job he has been doing for almost three months, since a huge wildfire tore through this landscape in July. The flames which swept across the hillsides are gone.
From where we are standing, there is little to suggest there is still a fire here at all. But that is exactly what we have come to find. After a bumpy drive into the woodland, Pete launches a thermal drone into the early morning sky.
I am given a job too: keeping the aircraft in sight while he studies the images being sent back to his screen. "Every week I hope that I find none," he tells me. "On the last thermal flight I did we found eight." "We might have something here," Pete says, as a white glow appears on the thermal image beneath a tree.
Three months after the fire first ignited, heat is still being detected beneath the ground. We make our way towards the coordinates identified by the drone, and at first, there is almost nothing to see. A rock Pete picks up from the ground is, too.
Nearby, after scraping away a thin layer of earth, smoke begins to rise. "It's really now cooking away," Pete says. "Without the thermal technology we would be totally blind to this." The wildfire began in the middle of July and burned across about 3,300 hectares – 33 sq km – of land, according to the Cairngorms National Park Authority.
At the height of the emergency, five experienced drone pilots were brought together to provide aerial information to the agencies fighting the fire. Pete describes it as one of the most challenging environments he has ever flown in, with "multiple walls of flame", personnel and vehicles moving around the site and helicopters operating overhead. The dramatic flames have disappeared, but hot spots can continue to burn beneath the earth.
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