Comment by Alex Arevalo on October 27, 2012 at 7:45am

Gary, I have no problem with what you have said. Unfortunately, just like during the early days of flight, there will be some participants that are a little too anxious to get to the thrilling parts and fail to "do the right thing". At least, in this case, little or no damage was done and no one was hurt. 

Comment by Seth on October 27, 2012 at 7:58am

Aaaaaand this is why we need, and will have, regulations. Surprised only that this hadn't happened sooner in such a public forum.

3D Robotics Comment by Chris Anderson on October 27, 2012 at 8:17am

If people would just OBEY THE RULES (ie, no flying over populated areas), such equipment failures wouldn't endanger people, the way this one easily could have. The rules are reasonable and in place for a reason. 

That was a crazy flight. Putting a heavy-lift Oct on a city street. Jesus.

Comment by Michael Evans on October 27, 2012 at 8:30am

That thing would have given someone a concision! You can see smoke from the battery around :57! The way it veered off like that also makes me think some kind of GPS hold had interference from the buildings.

3D Robotics Comment by Chris Anderson on October 27, 2012 at 8:41am

Erk. This week my colleagues at Wired UK asked Team Black Sheep to present at their conference in London. So they put quadcopters and planes in the air over Westminster! Ugh. I think I need to have a word with the Wired UK team--I don't think they knew the regs.

Raphael Pirker's company Team Black Sheep attaches cameras to drones to gain a different perspective of cities with beautiful aerial shots. The Wired 2012 delegation were surprised to discover that they too were filmed by a drone as they walked into The Brewery conference venue.

On stage, Pirker showed stunning close-up footage of Big Ben's clock face, the Houses of Parliament, the London Eye and the Gherkin as well as some peeved policemen who put an end to their aerial fun.

After leaving the stage, Wired.co.uk caught up with Pirker to find out what happened when they let a drone run wild in London, what the police said when they noticed the quadrocopter invading air space over Westminster and the confusion of city workers on high rise buildings when they come face-to-face with a flying robot.

Video: Three minutes with Raphael Pirker at Wired 2012 from Wired.co.uk on Vimeo.

Moderator Comment by Gary Mortimer on October 27, 2012 at 9:46am

And Trappy did'nt know what Big Ben was connected to either....

@Michael the thing was yawing on the ground before he lifted off so no pre flights no after take off check etc etc etc. I can't quite see the smoke but you could be right, Turnigys in a built up area perhaps ;-)

Comment by Peter Meister on October 27, 2012 at 9:55am

It is unfortunate that non-qualified pilots made such a flight in a congested city center. Clearly watching you can tell that this pilot had no clue what the heck he was doing. No pre-flight check, walking towards the quad to adjust it while the engines were still spooled.Launching straight up to almost 100 feet before settling into a hover to stabilize and center the vehicle, and the most ridiculous is watching him cross-correct the vehicle wrong thus causing it to fly towards the building because he did not have the basic R/C skills to know he was backwards facing himself. That one had me almost laughing, that is R/C 101 people. Learn how to fly the aircraft when it is coming towards you or as we say in R/C Heli circles NOSE - IN.... He had no clue he was even nose in....sad and this will be used by those who wish to deter our use of these for commercial/civilian industries.

Comment by Q on October 27, 2012 at 10:05am

Unfortunate that such an inexperienced pilot tried to make a flight like this. But I disagree with those that say UAV's should never be flown in such areas. There is some beautiful footage that you can get by flying in urban areas. I don't know about other people, but I don't want to see video after video of empty fields, mountains, trees, and nothing but nature landscapes.

I think there should be some qualification necessary before flying in urban/populated areas. But I wouldn't dare ban it all together.

Comment by Matthew Pitts on October 27, 2012 at 10:49am

I'll agree; learn to fly it before doing anything like flying in a city. Even then, the person controlling it needs to be aware that it won't fly the same way in the urban canyons as it does in the country. We don't need people that don't know how to control their aircraft giving the government any reason to put undue restrictions on us flying these things, especially if we want to use these in support of search and rescue, like the ones I want to build will be used.

Developer Comment by R_Lefebvre on October 27, 2012 at 10:53am

I think everybody here should hesitate before jumping to conclusions about the pilot's skill level, pre-flight, etc. etc.  First, there is no way to know what pre-flight was or was not done.  They could have spent an hour doing preflight, but that obviously does not make good YouTube fodder.  What you see might be the final stage before flight.  Who knows.

Second, I don't know how anybody can judge the pilot's skill without first knowing what the actual failure was, or what the flight plan was.  I didn't see it yaw on the ground, I saw it start yawing once about 3 feet up.  Maybe that was the plan.  Again, we don't know.

Did he lose orientation?  Or was he flying in GPS Atti mode, and the GPS got confused because of all the multipath reflections.  Maybe there was a motor failure, and the system simply couldn't cope.  I do notice that everything seems fine to me until it starts falling and losing attitude control and rotating at the same time. 

I'm not saying that something obviously went wrong here.  Just don't jump to conclusions and throw stones.  It's not fair to the pilot who we haven't heard from, and it's not fair to the entire community to feed fodder to those who want a complete ban on these things.

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