I live in Sydney Australia and fly an
Air 3 and a
Mini 2, mostly for fun, but I am accredited with CASA, and use them in my business to do solar pool heating inspections.
So, last night my wife and I went to the KISS concert at our Sydney Olympic Stadium and about 1/3 through the show I see these flashing LED’s out of the corner of my eye, and immediately I thought drone…
Sure enough somebody was flying it around inside the stadium at a number of heights from 5-30 meters directly over the crowd, and backwards and forwards right up to the stage!! I thought it may have been somebody from the crew, but regardless, if it was then they are still subject to the same restrictions.
Not only do we have restrictions on where we can fly, not within 30 meters of people, but this was around 9.30pm and we are not permitted to fly at night anywhere in Australia. We also have direct line of sught restrictions too, and there was no way the pilot could have seen the drone if they were outside the stadium, let alone the fixed and moving cameras on zip wires and other equipment that would have been virtually invisible to the obstacle avoidance system in that light. It’s a miracle it didn’t hit something and crash down on top of somebody… it looked to be a
Mavic 3 or similar size so at close to 1kg in weight from 30 meters up it could have been a fatality had things gone wrong.
Eventuallly the drone shot up out of the stadium and out of sight, probably never to be identified.
Idiot!! That’s a lot of risk for some cool video. It really annoys me that stuff like this happens that could cause injuries and deaths, and it turns the community against the overwhelming majority of law-abiding citizens who follow the rules. Very Annoyed!!