Dude, where’s my drone?

That’s what provincial police are asking after the force lost one of its unmanned aerial vehicles in a rural area near St. Thomas.

The drone’s disappearance — blamed on a technical malfunction — prompted the OPP to ground temporarily its entire fleet of 11 drones made by Waterloo-based Aeryon Labs Inc.

An OPP officer was test-flying the drone in Southwold Township Wednesday afternoon when he lost contact with the mini-aircraft, Elgin OPP said.

“It was flown up the standard 100 metres, then it went into GPS lock, which caused all communication with the operator’s tablet to cease,” Sgt. Dave Rektor said, adding the drone drifted northeast before disappearing from view.

The drone’s software had just been updated before its final flight, police said.

Aeryon is working closely with the OPP to help find the drone and pinpoint the problem, said David Proulx, the company’s vice-president of product.

“Early-stage investigation points to an isolated failure that does not impact the rest of the OPP fleet, and the OPP fleet as of this time has been restored to operational status,” Proulx wrote in an email Thursday.

Aeryon bills itself as a supplier of drones for police, military, wildlife managers and emergency responders.

While drones popular with hobbyists typically cost anywhere between $2,000 and $5,000, Aeryon’s high-end unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) cost significantly more.

The company doesn’t list prices online, but police in Durham recently shelled out $132,000 for an Aeryon Sky Ranger, the same model the OPP lost.

Rektor wouldn’t reveal how much the missing drone cost.

Police use drones — must-have tools for forces across the country — for everything from reconstructing crash scenes and searching for missing persons, to conducting manhunts and surveillance.

“They’re certainly becoming a very important part of our inventory,” Rektor said.

“We do depend on them (drones), but it’s really important that we take safety precautions to make sure we find out what happened and make sure it doesn’t happen again.”

Drones, whose operation is regulated in Canada, are widely used in many industries, including agriculture, to monitor crops, and utilities, to keep an eye on wires, railway tracks and pipelines.

If the OPP wants the public’s help finding its missing drone, it should release more information about its disappearance, said London drone enthusiast Joe O’Neil.

“Any . . . half-decent UAV pilot can sit down, we can look up the weather units today, we can look up the wind, and we can plot a course,” said O’Neil, a licensed commercial drone pilot with more than three years’ flying experience.

“And you can narrow down the range of this thing . . . Southwold overlooks Lake Erie. How do we know this thing isn’t in the middle of Lake Erie?” he asked.

Anyone with information about the missing drone is asked to call police at 1-888-310-1122.

dcarruthers@postmedia.com

twitter.com/DaleatLFPress