The use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in humanitarian relief has been proposed by researchers for searching victims in disaster affected areas. The urgency of this type of operation is to find the affected people as soon as possible, which means that determining the optimal flight path for UAVs is very important to save lifes. Since the UAVs have to search through the entire affected area to find victims, the path planning operation becomes equivalent to an area coverage problem. In this study, a methodology to solve the coverage problem is proposed, based on a Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDP) heuristic, which considers the observations made from UAVs. The formulation of the UAV path planning is based on the idea of assigning higher priorities to the areas which are more likely to contain victims. The methodology was applied in two illustrative examples: a tornado in Xanxerê, Brazil, which was a rapid-onset disaster in April 2015 and a refugee s camp in South Sudan, a slow-onset disaster that started in 2013. After simulations, it is demonstrated that this solution achieves full coverage of disaster affected areas in a reasonable time span. The traveled distance and the operation s durations, which are dependent on the number of states, did not have a significative standard deviation between the simulations. It means that even if there were many possible paths, due to the tied priorities, the algorithm has homogeneous results. The time to find groups of victims, and so the success of the search and rescue operation, depends on the specialist s definition of states priorities. A comparison with a greedy algorithm showed that POMDP is faster to find victims while greedy s performance focuses on minimizing the traveled distance. Future research indicates a practical application of the methodology proposed.