The media loves posting stories and videos of drones crashing. The public has become afraid of drones spying on them or falling from the sky. We can now add one more fear to the list because apparently you're no longer safe from drones, even inside.
David Perel was sitting at work when a DJI Phantom drone smashed through his window and into his head. Luckily for us the drone had been recording video the entire time. Perel simply removed the memory card and downloaded the footage.
Perel claims that "someone lost control of their drone" but after watching the footage I can say that the drone would never fly like that if it lost connection to the remote control. It appears to me like the pilot was purposefully flying like an idiot, spinning while flying at top speed. He simply failed to notice how close he was getting to Perel's office building.
Perel was not injured but let this be a reminder to all drone pilots to fly responsibly, especially around other people.
I don't mind admitting if that happened to me, I'd be billing the drone owner for cleaning my soiled underwear.
Don't worry, drone manufacturers have a lot of of pull. These are corporations, after all. They recently met with FAA regulators to legalize flying drones above crowds, which they'll probably get approved. What could possibly go wrong?...
You can see the operator at 7 seconds
Man.. I really hope this is a whip pan.. Unfortunately, the more I study the video, the more it appears real.
I bet he had (accidentally) flipped the CL or HL control mode on and did not know how to redirect or stop the Phantom. This would allow the flight path to remain straight towards the window while rotating as it did.
Dude scored a drone and a go-pro for his troubles tho.
"No mate, nothing come thru the window here. Try accounts, upstairs."
I am skeptical of this. That must have been some very thin glass in that office building.
agree with you Tom,
and it reversing through the window and how it lands is all too convenient.
The area does look a bit like a re-purposed industrial park; as in, the building may initially not have been intended for office space that far up. Those windows could initially have been intended only to let light into an industrial space, not to keep anything in or out. It's pretty common for old warehouses to be made into tech work spaces these days. But...the odds of such a thing happening in exactly this order with that much precision are staggering. I'm suspicious for the same reasons you are; this kind of publicity is pretty sweet for a developer nobody knows about. It could definitely be a hoax. In the end, given the placement of the workspace and the young-ish profiles of the pilots visible for a few moments, I wouldn't be surprised that two chuckleheads who had been coding for too many hours walked up to the roof and took their brand new drone, purchased on the company dime, to "test" it, not having any idea what they were doing and never having done a ground test. Double you double you double you dot manchildrenidiots dot com.
if you look at the phone at the end of the video, isn't it the drone video.. thus making the person who it hits the pilot?
It's not the drone video on the phone. The guy was watching a car video, and what's on his phone is someone behind a steering wheel.
Another idiot who can't control his drone...
If a little Phantom can smash that easily through a window panel.....its time to rethink the level/ quality of building standards.The windows in my office are 5cm thick, tempered, triple layer Saint Gobain glass panels.....a grown man would have to try very very hard to smash these even with a sledgehammer.
So many things in this video make it obvious that this is fake. Anybody that has flown and/or wrecked their drone know this isn't real.
Phantom Menace
Check this out. All a hoax to get publicity. https://skyvideo.wordpress.com/2016/04/10/huffington-post-lied-and-heres...
Let's not forget that the DJI Phantom doesn't have a Go Pro built in. That makes me think there's more to this story than what's being told.