Guys, stop buying and flying quads when you don't know what you are doing. Especially over crowds or populated areas. This should be common sense.
RAW video link - http://abclocal.go.com/wabc/video?id=9270819
You need to be a member of diydrones to add comments!
Comments
I guess it's inspired by Trappy / TBS risky flights. You can see the same from them at a higher skill/technical level.
Perhaps if manufactures such as 3DR wish to see a drone market in the future, they may want to take some of the responsibility into their own hands. Perhaps only sell to someone who has taken some sort of "drone training" or something of that sort. At least require that the basics be understood, including things that *should* be common sense to most of us (such as NOT flying over the middle of downtown New York City!). For example, you can't buy a large pre-made rocket motor without being a member of one of the big nationally accredited groups, NAR and Tripoli. Drones must follow suit if they wish to remain flying with minimum government impedance.
The DJI Phantom and the Blade 350QX are both in the $400.00 range RTFs that while they are relatively small are still plenty big enough to cause trouble in Public.
And because of the surging popularity, more and more people are buying them and soon there will be even cheaper models available.
For a variety of reasons these are gaining popularity faster than fixed wing or conventional helicopters and people who wouldn't think of either of those as something they might want to do see a multicopter with a camera as an attractive adult "toy".
This Christmas not only are inexperienced adults going to be filming the office Christmas party with them, but they are going to be giving them to their kids.
By next Christmas there could be No More Multicopters.
Stefan, the problem is this is the business model of LOTS of manufacturers. Including 3DR. There's money in RTF systems, but I do think they're very likely to destroy the unlicensed side of UAV (and even R/C) flight.
There've already been a dozen high profile crashes into crowds this summer, and two separate arrests In Germany for planned assassination attempts with RTF devices.
It's a matter of time until public safety is very publicly threatened in some way.
Let's hope the actions of these idiots do not result in a permanent overall ban. It seems that governments (USA, NL, DE, etcetcetc) seem to generalize "the drone users" and think that we all behave like this.
@Stefan, I couldn't agree with you more, especially with the DJI Phantom part of things but 3DR isn't far behind and you can't fix stupid. Just like with any in adamant object, quads, guns, cars, etc., people have to have some common sense.
It looks like the DJI phantom also hit his pant legs a couple of times...
Seriously, you think the guy flying this thing actually has ever come to DIY drones? You're absolutely right, common sense says not to do this - I suspect the guy flying this never had it to begin with, and I doubt he has it after this event. This is never going to stop, even if/when they make it illegal - people still shoot guns in the air even though that is illegal and obviously stupid. He flew it off the balcony of his apartment (crazy), who knows how he was even able to control it since it seems like you would pretty easily loose track of it once it got in the mass of buildings (visual noise)... I wouldn't be surprised if it was on GPS return to home when it was running into buildings - it's not like it can avoid anything.
One side note - it's pretty impressive how durable the Phantom is, being able to hit a building not once but several times, and continue flying...
Excuse me for generalizing but I think a large part of the problem lies with all those "DJI Phantom buyers" These quads work excellent, are easy to fly and ready to fly out of the box. THAT exactly is the problem. Previously you actually need to know something about the electronics and flying before you could fly a multicopter. Now with those phantom's everyone can fly. This means that people that really should not fly, will fly.
-
8
-
9
-
10
-
11
-
12
of 12 Next