Drone Smacks Guy In Head After Crashing Through Window, Then He Experiences Social Media Weirdness

Dan Perel's office window after a drone accidentally
flew through it and clonked him on the head.  

Earlier this year, Dan Perel was minding his own business on the fifth floor of a Cape Town, South Africa office building when a drone crashed through the window and smacked him in the head.

He wasn't badly hurt and downloaded the video the drone was taking using an attached GoPro.

The video went viral and Perel got a lesson in social media and trolls that was much more painful than getting clonked on the head by a drone.

Writing in Medium, he said he was attacked from all sides for supposedly faking the video to gain money and fame and all that. And maybe to hate on drones.

I understand the suspicion. If you believe everything you see on the internet,  have I got a wealthy Nigerian for you who could make you rich!

A lot of videos and such that go viral later turn out to be fakes.

This drone one seems legit, though. Perel says he made little money off the video, and the amount of vitriol he got online was stunning.

"To this day I am still dumbfounded by the reaction. Why would I go to such great lengths to CGI a fake video of a drone crashing into my head?"

Well, people have done stranger things than that, but I get Perel's point. It does seem like an awful lot of effort to go through to get yourself some fame.

It's well worth reading his essay in Medium before pursuing internet fame and fortune, or just getting a viral video out there.

Here's the drone's view of it crashing through the window and hitting Perel that started this whole thing:

This Eagle Doesn't Like Drones, Either

Looks like the eagle in this pre-collision image
didn't like the drone in its flight path.  

There's been plenty of news recently about people being irritated or worse about drones.

Airline pilots have had to deal with drones flying nearby, which might be dangerous.

Firefighters in California have had to suspend aerial wildfire fighting because drones interfered. (Hey! let's fly a drone, get in the way of fire crews and get GREAT footage of the wildfire getting worse as a result!)

And people are suing each other over drone flights that are compromising their privacy.

Even wildlife is getting into the anti-drone act. Watch a drone view of an eagle dealing with that very drone (FYI, the eagle was not injured in this incident. I think the drone was, though.)

Watch What Happens When You Fly A Drone Into A Volcano

An image from a Drone and GoPro
trip into the Bardarbunga volcano in Iceland.  

The Bardarbunga volcano in Iceland is still erupting spectacularly, so a couple of guys decided to fly a drone as close as they could to the spouting lava to get a good look.

(As an aside, I think "Bardarbunga" is an excellent name for a volcano, or anything for that matter.)

Anyway, you'll see the video they took below. The two guys were Eric Cheng, of DJI Phantom, which makes the drone they used. Photographer Ragnar Sigurdsson attached a GoPro camera to the drone.

The whole account, in Wired, of what happened is pretty cool.  Cheng managed to get the drone faithfully back from the volcano, despite radio transmission problems caused by the volcano.

It turns out the heat from the lava melted and destroyed the GoPro camera, but the memory card for the camera was intact, so they got the video.

The two men got closer to the volcano than local officials wanted them to, because it was so dangerous The day after they were there, a caldera wall in the volcano collapsed, suddenly flooding the spot they were standing with a flash flood of hot lava.

Yikes!

Here's the wild video, h/t Gizmodo.

Let's Fly A Drone Through Some Fireworks

Now that the Fourth of July weekend is over, we can review the fun we had with fireworks displays.

A drone's eye view of a fireworks display. Add caption

The best video I've seen wasn't shot during the recent Fourth of July weekend.

It was uploaded in May, and shows a drone's eye view of a fireworks display. Yep, they flew the thing right through the fireworks.

Not to be a killjoy, but the flight of the drone through the fireworks was probably dangerous and illegal, according to Forbes. 

The drone could have diverted parts of the fireworks into the crowd, or the drone could have been hit, and drone debris could have fallen on people on the ground.

I'm sure we'll see more dangerous, but fascinating videos taken from drones. I just hope nobody does something so stupid people really get hurt.

The drone, and the attached camera, somehow made it intact through the fireworks.  

Wild video, though. Watch:

More Use For Drones: Gathering News At Disaster Zones

This post is sort of a bleed over from my sister blog, Matt's Weather Rapport, which has been focused on the nation's tornadoes this week.  

A drone took this image of tornado destruction in Arkansas.  

I just find it interesting that drones are becoming a bigger and bigger part of our lives. Including news gathering.

They're not just for weapons in murky overseas war zones anymore.

They launched a drone over Interstate 40 in Mayflower, Arkansas after a deadly, scary tornado passed through on Sunday.

The result was this fascinating footage: