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:
But as you’ll see if you let the video continue to run, its camera survives. While the drone owners make their way to the errant craft, the thing itself is promptly inspected by a curious area cat.
When the cat leaves, three young girls arrive to give the formerly flying object a thorough once-over. When they run off, the drone briefly flickers with energy, as if trying to escape. But the girls come back to scream and poke at the device some more.
All of this is scored with an at-times ominous instrumental soundtrack, and really is almost cinematic. Watch the full 5:42 clip from start to finish here.
Elsewhere: “Drone crashes into beach kids at Seaside Park!” promises a different video, but really this is another one where the post-crash captures are the most memorable: It’s more like the kids crash into the fallen drone.
The device starts going down at around the 3:15 mark (and doesn’t actually hit any human being when it finally thuds to earth).
From there the video is a document of drone abuse. After observing a brief sputter that kicks sand into the their faces, the kids pretty much go Lord of the Flies on the thing — picking it up, running around with it, flinging it, cursing it, giving it the finger, and so on.
Meanwhile, the machine continues to capture fantastic images of its tormenters (beautifully distorted by the fish-eye lens) under crystal-blue skies. Eventually an adult shows up and the gizmo is taken to a lifeguard. The last thing we see is someone peering into the camera: “Dude,” he says, “it’s still recording.”
Indeed. Watch the unreasonably long 18:21 full version here.
But my favorite post-crash footage involves a quadcopter that (according to the video description) went awry when its signal was messed up by nearby power lines. Its descent begins at about the 1:09 mark.
Some kids find it, still sadly whirring in a field. They pick it up. Drop it. Wave it around. Squeal with delight. Throw it into the air as if it were a bird that needed a little help.
Eventually someone I take to be their mother shows up. “We’ll set it down,” she suggests, “and see if it will go away.”
It doesn’t go away. The kids — a boy and a girl — mess around with the gadget some more. Eventually the boy loses interest; the girl quietly examines the drone, which dutifully captures her charming curiosity.
See the entire 15-minute version here.
Drone fiction
After flying over a residential area, a body of water, busy roads, and so on, toward an office building, this drone starts to fail about 2:17 into this clip, provocatively titled “MASSIVE Crash with Phantom Drone!”
Watch to the end, because this video has a plot twist. Scrolling subtitles after the crash describe how the vehicle shattered the building’s window, injuring two people, and bounced off a parked Cadillac, costing the drone’s pilot more than $80,000 in damages.
Spoiler alert! All of that was made up by whoever posted this clip. While the crash was real, the video goes onto explain, the invented dire consequences are meant to serve as a cautionary note — it could have turned out that badly, and we’re all lucky it didn’t.
“I screwed up,” the video notes read, “and I am sharing that mistake and my thoughts with all of you in the hope that some of you may avoid my error.” Watch the whole thing start to finish here.
Yikes
In probably the most harrowing clip I found, the crash occurs around three minutes in:
You’ll note two things immediately. First, the smack-up is pure pilot error: The drone is sent straight toward a high-rise balcony and hits it.
Second, this happened in Manhattan.
This is a case where it’s worth watching the whole thing if you really want to be unnerved. The drone lifts straight up over an intersection, pivots around, and flies between tall buildings — over lots of cars and pedestrians, hovering at one point almost directly above a crowd of people.
Eventually the pilot seems to take an interest in what’s happening in one building’s balcony-level offices, and zooms in that direction — with unfortunate results. It’s very lucky that the device managed to get through to the balcony and didn’t plummet to the street.
Cunning readers will point out that this isn’t really a “flyaway” scenario, it’s just failed piloting. Fair enough, but before you take comfort in that caveat, please note that there is no shortage of video documentation of people in full “control” of their drone, flying it squarely into things.
Like trees:
Or wires:
Or really beautiful rock formations:
Those last three examples are all by way of this compilation of drone crashes — mostly pilot error, not flyaway scenarios, but if you just want to see a bunch of wrecks as quickly as possible, here you go.
Curses!
This drone is swooping around an unpopulated waterside area, capturing some nice footage. Then, at 1:40, it starts to careen, crashes, wheezes, sputters, and falls silent.
The best bit comes when the owner arrives to retrieve the thing. “Son of a bitch!” he comments, carrying the device away. “What the f***?” Pause. “Jesus.” Pause. “The f***?” Pause. “Now that’s a flyaway. Son of a bitch.”
Not much I can add to that. The full clip is here.
The lonely documentarian
The subtitles in this clip openly admit that the operators of this drone were just trying to get the hang of the thing — and failed. They send the machine into the skies … and within a minute and a half lose contact with it.
But the drone, on its own, flies upward and onward, meandering high over open fields ringed by distant mountains (the Swiss Alps, in fact) on the curved horizon, capturing minutes of truly lovely footage. Eventually it starts losing power, and even its spinning descent, starting around 6:46, is gorgeous.
Bonus points for the ambient-techno soundtrack, identified as “America” by Dusty Kid. The video closes with a few highlight still images from the drone’s solo voyage. Watch the entire 8:40 clip here.
Drone come home!
As the subtitles explain, this drone owner had no idea what went wrong when he lost contact with the device as it cruised over a suburban neighborhood (to the foreshadowing sound track of Tom Petty’s “Free Fallin’.”) Nor did the pilot know that his drone’s auto-home feature actually kicked in. Just as it was supposed to, the machine paused, reoriented itself, and headed back, on auto-pilot, to its launch point.
The non-auto pilot, however, wasn’t there anymore, having meanwhile driven a mile in the opposite direction, in a frantic search for the drone. So there was nobody around when it subsequently lost power and made a sad and lonely spiral to the ground, at 4:07:
Watch that complete, poignant journey — the scrolling suburban homes and Petty’s ennui-laced lyrics pair rather nicely, actually — here.
The auto-home feature plays into one last flyaway clip that I liked quite a bit. The pilot, conducting a “range test,” sends a drone over some houses and toward the nearby beach.
Just over the ocean, it loses contact. The pilot blindly attempts to direct a 180-degree turn but sends the craft slightly in the wrong direction — soaring over a housing complex of some sort, with tennis courts and rooftop sunbathers.
Right when you’re starting to wonder how bad this will get, the gadget stops and hovers. Then hovers some more. Then, evidently, figures out where “home” is.
A few minutes later, the drone lands on its own, “two feet from where it took off,” the pilot writes in the video’s captions.
That’s right: There was no crash, so I have no shortcut-to-the-smashup link to offer. But if you just want to watch the triumphant descent, start here.
While this last clip is different by way of its happy ending, I’d say there’s more to the flyaway-video genre in general than just a bunch of wrecks (satisfying as those may be). Practically every one of these videos is its own mini-narrative, touching on everything from the limits of technology to childhood wonder to a pilot’s rapid journey from hubris to helplessness.
What we learn from flyaway videos, perhaps, is that all happy drone flights are all alike, but every unhappy drone flight is unhappy in its own way.
Write to me at rwalkeryn@yahoo.com or find me on Twitter, @notrobwalker. RSS lover? Paste this URL into your reader of choice: https://www.yahoo.com/tech/author/rob-walker/rss.
