Drone News

This was an incredibly close call. Top professional Alpine skier Marcel Hirscher of Austria was nearly hit by a falling drone during a slalom race.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) officially refers to quadcopters as Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) but they obviously have more in common with the kind of hobbyist’s radio-controlled aircraft that have been around since I was a member of the Poly Aeroneers in high school. Yet tech blogs and social media endlessly refer to quadcopters as “drones” when the only thing a General Atomics MQ-1 Predator and a DJI Phantom 1 have in common is that they’re capable of flight. But they’re not without some controversy.

If you’ve ever flown a drone, you know these flying eggbeaters are prone to crashing…sometimes in very hard-to-reach locations.

Lots of people do dumb things with their imaging drones but this is one of the dumber – though oddly satisfying – clips we’ve seen.

Here’s a harrowing wildlife video with a (spoiler alert) happy ending that went viral today. If you haven’t seen it yet, it shows a mother bear and her cub trying to reach the top of a snowy slope. It also offers an important lesson about drone operators not flying their drones too close to wildlife scenes.

If you haven’t seen this epic drone video yet, it should help you get over the Monday blues. (And even if you’ve already seen it, it’s definitely worth watching again for a few laughs.)

I can’t understand the current love affair between photographers and drones. Like all kids I made paper airplanes which I anonymously launched toward unsuspecting substitute homeroom teachers, sure. Sometimes with uncanny accuracy. Is the current drone rage the ultimate technological evolution of the balsawood P-51 Mustang? Or are we channeling our inner Wright brothers?