"Drone" at the White House
 

Those flyaways........should be interesting to see what kind it is.

Congratulations IDIOT
 

You just killed this hobby......

Flying a drone over the White House fence.....Really?

As Forrest Gump said, "Stupid is as stupid does." This should be enough for the Feds to take action. Congratulations, Stupid.

Bound to happen, surprise it took this long that some knot-head does it.

Anyone care to speculate as to the kind of charges that may be brought when they locate the owner of the "device"?

Frank

First thing is a violation of a TFR.

FAA can't legally do anything more than that.

Now for what punishment the SS could swing, not too sure.

But to do it at 3am is very suspect.......

Since the AMA seems to be taking such a pro-drone stance lately, I hope they will comment on this.

I doubt the AMA will weigh in on this issue.

I think the AMA is "pro-drone" for those that are operated in accordance with AMA guidelines. This one...not so much.

It's not the first time someone has crashed a plane into the White House. It wasn't the "end of aviation" when it happened...but times have changed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Eugene_Corder

You are absolutely correct.

Spotted by a guy on the ground? What happened to the rooftop surveilance and detection system? And I as I recall there are supposed to be something like Phalanx systems up there.

I think we should bring back tarring and feathering for all the Drone Idiots out there....line them up at Joe Knoll and let everybody take shots at them. Jeez our reactionary government will surely do something to restrict model aviation. The average person, including government bureaucrats, has no knowledge of the AMA and will certainly blame ALL modelers for this type of behavior. Restrictions ARE coming, just a matter of time

That's all we need. Someone could be killed by a gattling gun trying to shoot down a toy!

The restrictions are already in place! You can't fly any type of plane or model within 30 miles of the White House...it's against the law. But, law breakers don't obey laws. What to do? Make more laws so law breakers can break them too?

You can't fix stupid!!

+1

It was a government employee flying it, not a secret service agent though.

How f-ing stupid.

Steve

Having laws already in place, has never stopped them from passing more. Many examples of this.

Govt employee flying for recreational purposes...says it just got away from him. Understatement of the year. Most updated story indicates the Secret Service believes him. One story showed a DJI, another what looked like a homebuilt. Not good timing.

http://us.cnn.com/2015/01/26/politic...ice/index.html http://www.rcuniverse.com/forum/atta...mentid=2068016

I don't buy that it was a DJI. I was under the impression that DJI had programing (maybe only the new inspire?) that did not allow their craft to fly at all within a radius of airports and other restricted areas.
Unless the alleged pilot did not read the instructions and tried to fly anyway, without calibrating the GPS. That would also explain the crash..........Also what I don't buy is the fact
that 3am a government employee was flying a multi-rotor. I smell a cover story.........

Government employee, how could he be expected to know what he was doing was against the law!

Yea i dont think your going to hear to much from the goofs in AMA who let them in ,better to bury their heads in the sand and hide. joe

The DJI software has some rudimentary controls in place. They have an airport database that restricts flying within a certain radius of some major airports and restricts altitude as you move away from the airpot. Around Reagan National there is a 1.5 mile NO-FLY zone, and then from there out to 8 miles the altitude goes from 35 feet to 400 feet.

http://www.dji.com/fly-safe/category-mc

The White House is just over 3 miles from Reagan National, so a Phantom could easily be flown around the White House area and at altitudes up to a couple of hundred feet.

In addition, this software is only operative on the Phantom 2 series of DJI quads and only if the most current software is uploaded to the quad.

The DJI "Fly Safe" is a joke. In the LA area only LAX, John Wayne and Ontario are in the database. Long Beach, Bob Hope, Van Nuys, Los Alamitos, Torrance, Chino, Whiteman, Hawthorne, Santa Monica, and El Monte are all absent from their database. So an uninformed DJI owner could fire it up and fly near any of those airports thinking he is good to go based on DJI's flawed "Fly Safe" software.