So , with all the "bad bad drone" stories we keep seeing on the 6:00 news , here's an interesting twist ;
This morning , the Boston news program running on channel 7 was covering a story of a building fire . No big news here , buildings catch fire a lot and structure fires are a regular thing in most news reports . But this one was different . The entire 30 second or so video clip of the firefighting operations that was shown was video from , you guessed it (as the reporter so happily chirped) "A neighbor's drone" !
Here , we have the FAA and AMA trying to promote "safe droning" and then we have news outlets like channel 7 encouraging unsafe drone use by using this video ? As we all know not flying over folk's heads and not interfering with emergency operations are two of the safety guidelines for all remote control aircraft and here we have a major metropolitan news outlet using video obtained unsafely ? My belief is that not one person at channel 7 knows one thing about drones and I'll bet they haven't a clue about the safety rules that were broken in the video they used .
So now , since this one droner got his "15 minutes of fame" by having his video shown on TV as the centerpiece of a firefighting operation story , You can expect more drones hovering over more disaster incidents , so the next droner can get his 15 minutes as well .
Shame on Boston's channel 7 news for using unsafely obtained video !