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Science Teacher Arrested After Crashing Drone At US Open
An anonymous reader writes: We all had that science teacher growing up — the one who took his classroom experiments a little too far. The one with the potato cannon. The one who made you wonder how he didn't get into trouble in his spare time. Well, it's finally happened for one science teacher from New York City. The 26-year-old man was arrested last night after he crashed a drone into some empty seats at the U.S. Open. He was charged with reckless endangerment, reckless operation of a drone, and operating a drone in a New York City public park outside a prescribed area for doing so. Nobody was injured, but the drone did fly through the arena while a pair of tennis players were in the middle of a match. The game was briefly interrupted when the drone crashed.
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It wasn't harmless.
A quad with any camera worth a shit on it is going to weigh in at 5-10 pounds minimum. A drop of even 10 feet, at 5 pounds, onto your head, with any sort of good sharp edge ... your skull is going to be split open. This is a simple matter of physics. Gravity does all the work. The propellers aren't what you're afraid of, its one of the support arms or screws jabbing into your brain that you should be worried about.
There are many many many ways it can hurt you in that fall that don't involve a lethal injury that you wouldn't enjoy at all either.
You don't need explosives for a quad to be lethal, this idiot was more than enough to seriously wound or kill someone due to nothing more than shear ignorance.
Best part ... he's a fucking science teacher who should understand the basic laws of physics well enough to not do something this stupid.
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A quad with any camera worth a shit on it is going to weigh in at 5-10 pounds minimum.
I have a quad-copter with a 4MP camera, that is good enough to do roof / solar-panel inspections. It weighs less than one pound. The cell-phone-quality camera weighs two grams (about the weight of a penny). The only significant weight is the battery, and that can also be light if you are willing to sacrifice flight time.
It wasn't harmless.
It was harmless. As in, according to the story, there was no harm caused.