Public safety officials credit airborne speakers for helping save a 4-year-old girl, named Zoey, who in March was lost in the woods near Brookings, Ore.
The speakers, attached to an aircraft, played a recorded message of the girl’s grandmother “that was loud and clear and likely kept Zoey hanging on to hope that she was not alone and would be found,” says a letter by Timothy M. Evinger, the sheriff of Klamath County, Ore.
When Zoey was found, he writes, she “was on death’s doorstep.”
The Airborne Public Address System was unveiled in March as a way to notify Hawaiians of potential tsunamis. The system delivers recognizable voice messages to anyone within a roughly three-mile radius of the aircraft and is intended to replace traditional sirens that are placed atop buildings or on poles.
“This was the only speaker that could reach out that far and you could still understand what was coming out,” says Scott Bakker, who heads the nonprofit group Guardians from Above, which developed the system. A West Virginia-based company called Power Sonix manufactured the speakers.
Mike Grady, Power Sonix’s vice president, says the speakers rely on magnetic materials and high-gain amplifiers to project a clear voice over the roar of a plane engine and across miles of land. He declined to provide further technical details.
“If they’d had this in Katrina, they could have told the entire city in an hour where the food, water and medical supplies were,” Grady says. “People forget that when the power goes out, your cell phone can’t be charged.”
Guardians from Above is now marketing the system to civil air patrols and defense agencies.
Bakker recently flew with the system over a town in Oregon — with the sheriff’s permission — and blasted the song “We Are the Champions” to celebrate a victory by the high school baseball team.
“Nobody complained,” he says.