"Watching Saturday’s events unfold, Jones said he knew the job must have cost City Light “quite a bit of money” because there were eight line workers and a fleet of trucks and service vehicles. But when he asked workers what it was costing, he didn’t expect $35,000.
“That is a staggering sum of money — all for the benefit of the liberty to fly some toy around in an environment where it doesn’t belong,” he said."
Full story by the Seattle Times here.
Comments
115kV lines are nothing to take lightly. Yes $35,000 is probably a fair sum for all the effort to fetch that thing off the wires. The e-field energy around them as well as the m-field could have been a contributor to the event. I doubt DJI tested their aircraft for those conditions. The operational environment for an aircraft to be used for power line inspections will require certification/testing for risk reduction/mitigation. The numbers for these power lines were crunched long ago.
This was probably not considered in a $3000 consumer product made for 'the shot'. The linemen are usually dealing with metal foil balloons for birthdays/parties causing havoc. Now they get to start adding little drone stickers to their helmets (I'm kidding... sorta).
Credit goes to the flyer for sticking around and not ducking out. A mindset of anti-authority/anti-responsibility is a fast way to get onerous legislation for this activity.
Don't get me started about flying in/around crowds. That's just dumb.
-=Doug
If only we had some type of technology that allowed cameras to shoot from above safely. :-)
No points for being so foolish in the first place, in the ticket sales did the entire audience give the right for a dangerous machine to be flown over their heads? Oh the humanity I know. A risk assessment would have shown that was a dumb dumb thing to do. Now that a crowd has been flown over for a big name like that plenty of folks will believe its ok.
Gary, I think the drone was being used by the tour to get crowd shots. It says he sometimes grabs it mid-air to take shots of the crowd himself but "something went wrong" (and he missed). Points to him for sticking it out for the rest of the show though.
Not a great day for Inspires indeed:
This is a good example of why drones should come equipped with a 'self destruct' feature.
Enrique Iglesias injured on stage by a multirotor http://www.suasnews.com/2015/05/36305/enrique-iglesias-grabbed-a-dr... His own fault but not a great day for Inspires.
That Inspire in the power lines must have been activated on the app so DJI knows who owns it. The Police won't take long to find the owner and get the money for the recovery back.
One of the things that is interesting is that the drone that did this is obviously a $3000.00 DJI Inspire.
You'd really think that anybody investing that much would have a lot better idea of what they should and shouldn't do.
That said however there are now many tens (probably hundreds) of thousands of assorted multicopters out there, and most of the people who own them are completely clueless.
This is clearly a Juggernaut that is going to have ongoing consequences.
I don't know if we can actually do anything effective, but it would certainly be to our own and everyone else's benefit if we became more visible in proactively promoting safety, common sense and "rule" following.
As long as we just sit around here talking about it, the fate of our hobby / passion lies firmly in the hands of those who would ban it outright.
Best regards,
Gary
While this is clearly another case of a "drone" operator not doing what they are supposed to do. It's things like this...
“It could have been someone engaged in peeping-Tom activities,” he said of whoever was operating the drone. “But, it became a safety concern.”
in the news article that just make me shake my head. at 120 feet there is no way you could be engaged in "peeping tom activities" with the non zoom camera on board. Plus it's clearly beautiful scenery. The person was completely stupid for flying there, but, does the media have to fuel fears of peeping toms to ignorant masses of what the intention and capabilities of these "drones" are?