Slashdot Mirror
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.
What was he doing, going around saying "Anyone seen my drone?". Why didn't he toss the controller into the water get the hell out of there with a sign off to the class of "Thats what happens when you don't concentrate kids. Now everyone into the bus, fast!"
Douches like this prick are why we can't have nice things.
I fly all sorts of RC aircraft, Quads, fixed wing plane's, Helis, even a flying lawn mower (model, not actually a lawnmower) and I've been doing it for 25 years and never has there been an issue of people getting upset about it until recently.
You know why? Cheap electronics introducing artificial stability at a price that allows any fucking moron without the slightest clue to buy one and manage to fly it for more than 10 seconds. Before artificial stability (i.e. before there was any hope of an RC quadcopter), pricks like this would have bought one, flown it for 10 seconds, crashed it in his front yard and that would be the end of it because he wouldn't be willing to spend that money again for another 10 seconds of flight time until he learned to fly. He'd never learn to fly because he's not bothering to try, he's just throwing it in the air without understanding how/why/when its going to come down and what effects thats going to have on others.
When I see assholes like this, I tell them to get their fucking quad out of the air immediately or I'm calling the cops, and I've called them twice, the last for some asshole flying over a high school football game. Guy was a software dev at a large tech company, should fucking know better and understand that a 5 pound object falling on your head from even 10 feet above is WAY beyond potentially lethal.
So take this worthless fuck out back, string him up by his testicles and keep him the fuck out of RC * so he doesn't fuck it up for the rest of us.
This shit is why the FAA cares, and I'm 100% with them on it. I don't want additional laws, but this is a real problem in a new arena that previously had barriers to entry that kept idiots out. The modern flight controllers (which I use and love) are like exploit kits for script kiddies. They give ability to do something without the tempering that comes with learning how to do it 'the hard way', or understanding the consequences of what you're doing.
I don't have a good solution to this problem because the problem is caused by adults who haven't grown up yet or are too selfish/ignorant to care and those are problems we've been dealing with since the beginning of time without solving, but it does have to be addressed, which problem means I'm going to get screwed in the process.
I can not stress this statement enough: The guy flying that drone was an ignorant fucking asshole. 50 lashes wouldn't be enough.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Selfish idiots like this are going to ruin the hobby for all of us. The FAA rules are pretty clear: 5 miles of an airport, nowhere near stadiums.
Quads fall out of the sky. A motor fails, a battery unexpectedly dies (or explodes), a sensor goes haywire... the number of things that can cause a quad to quit working is endless. If something quits, it drops like a stone - and a responsible pilot know that.
I hate the idea of an R/C license... but if it keeps the selfish idiots grounded then it's probably the way to go. Unfortunately.
...
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.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
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.
morons like this are why the drone-boys are going to be facing some new laws in the not-so-distant future.
He was arrested. Why do we need "new laws" when his behavior is already illegal under existing law?
My abiding memory of science teaching was the chemistry teacher who wanted to demonstrate the reactivity of phosphorous with air. He pulled a large stick of phosphorus (oxidised on the outside) out of a jar of water and carefully sliced off a small section. He then rushed to drop the rest of the stick back into the jar of water, but he missed and it bounced off the rim of the jar, landed on the table and promptly burst into flames and began to fill the room with fumes.
Science!
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.