Crash into Tree: The Fascinating New Genre of Drone Flyaway Videos
It’s been quite a year for unmanned aerial vehicles — or drones, to you and me.
Forget the familiar military and business uses for the machines. In 2014 it’s been the hobbyist, the recreational user, the drone owner who’s into it for fun, not profit, at the center of this gadget craze. Even our own David Pogue has “become a crazyhead about flying drones this year.”
Drone mania has had some cool side effects. All kinds of people really are capturing amazing images, both stills and video, from high in the air that previously would have required massively expensive equipment.
They’re also capturing footage of their drones crashing, thanks to embedded cameras that keep rolling before, during, and after these hobbyist drones come tumbling down.
A “flyaway” incident is the name given to what happens when a drone operator loses control of his zooming-and-hovering airborne device. Sometimes this happens when the “pilot” sends the thing out of its intended range of control. Sometimes it’s not clear what went wrong. (We’re talking about a relatively fledgling technology, after all.)
But, predictably, there is no shortage of “flyaway” footage available for your consideration on YouTube.
Good news: The hobbyist community seems to have a better safety record than TGI Fridays: In the scores of such videos that I watched, nobody got clocked.
Less-good news: This may be a matter of luck, because a startling number of these drone flops happened over populated areas — suburban neighborhoods, beaches, and even, in one case, Manhattan.
And the unexpected bonus: It turns out that these videos can be almost accidentally fascinating. Each is a sort of mini-narrative, ultimately turning on failure, but often laced with moments of techno-poetic wonder.
This may not be obvious at first, since the scariest, coolest, or inadvertently magic moments are sometimes buried deep into otherwise-dull clips. Since you’re a busy person, and I am a dedicated soldier in the Yahoo Tech army, I’ve made it easy for you in the examples below: The embedded videos are set to jump straight to the part where the drone is about to lose it. (But I’d argue that at least some of these are worth watching start to finish, so I’ve added those links, too.)
The classic crash
Here, for instance, a DJI Phantom carrying a GoPro camera “gets lost” and “runs out of power hundreds of feet up,” according to the video’s description. The harrowing climax begins around the 3:25 mark:
Pretty cool, right? Most flyaway videos include a long preamble, in which everything is working just fine. So if you want to experience all the suspense, watch the entire 5:39 version, with captions breaking down the, um, breakdown, here.
Or skip ahead to another incident: According to the notes on the video, a quadcopter “started acting crazy,” scooting of its own accord into an area dense with streets and buildings. Soon the pilot “thought I had it back under control.” Evidently not: Things ended badly when the drone smacked into a building and dropped like a rock:
Lost and found
Oddly, some of the most captivating imagery is captured after a drone has plunged from the sky. In this clip, for instance, the thing whomps onto some suburban driveway at about the 1:38 mark:
https://www.yahoo.com/tech/drones-gone-wild-the-poetry-of-flyaway-videos-105377021664.html
