Don Bigham flies his new DJ Inspire 1 drone at his residence. He volunteers his time and the drone to the Trained Trackers faith based search team.

MT. VERNON, Ill. — First responders and law enforcement officials in Southern Illinois have a new resource to help them search for missing persons when the need arises.

Don Bigham, a retired paramedic and firefighter, works with Trained Trackers, a faith-based search and rescue unit associated with the Illinois Baptist State Association’s disaster relief program. He recently purchased a DJ Inspire 1 drone and completed training to fly the five-pound craft. He plans to donate his time and the drone to help local police departments and other first responders when a missing person is reported.

With four motors and an on-board camera that can rotate 360 degrees, record videos and take still pictures, the drone is “a new and interesting tool” that can be used to cut down on manpower and time needed to organize search and rescue efforts, according to Bigham.

“If you imagine that you had a child lost in a farm area and they were walking in a field, you’d have to put 40 or 50 men in an area, and it would take a lot of time to go through,” Bigham said. “Now we can fly the drone over the top of it and have people in each corner of the field, ready to move. It’ll cut down on search (time) by a lot.”

Using an iPad, Bigham can maneuver the drone to varying heights which cover varying amounts of land. It can fly up to 45 miles per hour. The camera is capable of observing up to 10 acres of land at a time, and it feeds video and still images back to its controller that can be closely scrutinized for search objects.

“If you’re doing a grid search, you’d just have to send people to each corner (of a search area) to observe, and then when you get confirmation, just move in,” Bigham said.

He told the Mount Vernon, Illinois Register-News that the drone will help the Trained Trackers put Christian principles into practice in a unique way.

“It becomes a service to the community,” he said. “It provides us a way of doing something in a Christian manner that helps people recognize that God intended us to help one another.”

The Mount Vernon, Illinois Register-News contributed to this story.