Except this drone pilot wasn’t some random schlub, he was part of the TV team that was paid to be there.
Lots of questions:
How qualified is he at flying drones?
Why did it crash: operator error? battery die? interference?
Did he make a mistake with the controls or was he not situationally aware enough? As someone who flies (at low level), has used a drone, & also deals with remote cameras, I can tell you there can be a huge difference between knowing what your camera is seeing & knowing where it is. If he was concentrating on the view on his screen, he may not have realized that he crossed over onto the course when he wasn’t supposed to be.
Anything like this that we’ve done/plan to do has two people at the controls, one flying the drone, looking up, & one operating the camera, looking down at the screen. The one flying never takes his eyes from the sky. One person can’t do both if you need any degree of precision &/or have constant movement.
Humanity and our accomplishments follow a power law distribution. Most of us, myself included, are useless breeders who can be replaced. Sure we may be good people and good family members and whatnot, but we contribute nothing of novel value to society. At best we are trained cogs in a machine we didn’t create.
It is the top 10% who actually make society run, and it is more the elite minority of them that keep society running. The 1% or less of truly innovative and talented people who create the next generation of social and technological progress.
The point is that, the people who are obsessed with selfies probably aren’t in that 1% so it doesn’t matter. Science and social progress will march on unhindered. It is like worrying about what a rural farmer in China’s impact will be on the scientific R&D in Beijing. Spoiler: none.
If the pilot couldn’t follow the simple instruction of not flying over the track he is not qualified to operate a microwave oven, let alone a drone.
As for situational awareness, in my experience it is much better when flying in FPV (First Person View) mode, many times when flying at the park with goggles on people tell me I’m about to fly into a tree when I can clearly see from my POV that I’m nowhere near hitting anything.
Of course that is the case while using a camera dedicated to flying, not one mounted on a gimbal to pan and tilt every which way, in that case, as you said, there needs to be one pilot and one camera operator.
There’s also the issue that quadcopters (as the one that crashed) make it difficult to see which way they are going, they are symmetrical in two axes and if things go pear shaped a pilot flying visually can easily be confused as to which way to move the controls to avoid a collision.
That link has the obligatory, “customers also bought” photos, and I swear that pile of shot or whatever that is looks like a nug of weed at first glance. I couldn’t reconcile that at all.:rolleyes:
I can totally see a future where we have a tiny camera hovering over our heads 24/7 recording every moment of our lives. Largely useless but wouldn’t it be totally cool, after the novelty wears off, to rewind 10 years ago and see exactly what your Christmas or other special event was like?
I use a CPAP machine.
Thanks to today’s much better, thank you! technology, I can now log on to a website and see how I slept last night.
My gas meter transmits my fuel usage.
It is not beyond possible for every drone to transmit its video to Big Brother.
With GPS co-ordinates so they can quickly see every available video for a given time and place.
And Big Brother would not be the only entity with that capability.
Your car insurance company might be real interested in not only the crash, but every time the car’s GPS and your personal GPS were the same points.
