My clients and customers look at me and go whats all the fuss about, every kid comes up and asks "Hey mister how high can it go?" Well until you see crazy stunts like this you never really understand what can, will and could happen...
The regulations governing flying drones, especially in the US, are not always perfectly clear. That being said, it’s generally not advised—and often times illegal—to fly drones anywhere near airports, or anywhere that planes tend to fly. Regardless, one hobbyist thought it would be fun to hack into their drone and try to fly it as high as they possibly could.
Popular Science reported Mar. 8 that an anonymous YouTuber called Tollymaster recently uploaded a video of a modified DJI Phantom 2 drone which they claimed to have flown to upwards of 11,000 ft—or 2 miles—into the sky. DJI drones have software built-in that prevents them from flying through restricted airspace (such as airports), or above 1,500 feet, meaning the pilot presumably hacked into the device’s software and overrode the factory settings. The US Federal Aviation Administration, for reference, restricts drones flying above 400 feet, though it’s unclear where this video was filmed.
While the footage that they recorded was pretty spectacular, it’s quite reckless to have done this in the first place, seeing as the drone is ranging out of the pilot’s line of sight (which is another requirement of the FAA), and into territory that airplanes could be taking off or landing, or helicopters might be operating in. That’s not to mention that if the battery had died—or the pilot had lost the ability to control the machine at that height, the resulting drone-shaped meteorite would’ve been a disaster for anyone in the impact zone.
Tollymaster removed the video from YouTube after a spate of comments from other drone hobbyists berating their unsafe flying. However, a Dutch blog called DroneWatch snagged a copy of the video before it was taken down, if you want to watch the Phantom’s flight in full.
It’s unlikely that this sort of behavior would be very well received by regulatory bodies like the FAA, seeing as people are already crashing drones into stadiums and presidential residences, hindering firefighting operations, and strapping weapons to them for fun. While some are working on building drones to deliver medicine to those in need and save lives in remote areas, reconfiguring these machines to allow them to enter airspace this high won’t help convince people that drones are more helpful than dangerous.
The Above is the actual footage and below is the dutch transaltion of the article
In an attempt to break the world 'how high can you fly a drone consumers' break is an anonymous person from the Netherlands Phantom 2 brought to a height of up to 3.4 km. That is more than 3 km above the maximum height of 120 meters which since July 1, 2015 in accordance with the Scheme model flying as ceiling applies to hobby drones.
Undoubtedly the 'record' will, which seems to be included in Hellevoetsluis , lead to substantial discussions on the safe use of drones . At a height of 3.4 kilometers you can indeed run into regular air traffic, and the drone of that height for some reason falls to a lot of damage down - or injury - cause. In this case, the landing went well, but the battery had only 4% capacity at the moment of countries.
We hope that no one is interested to improve this record. Whether such stunts with firmware updates by manufacturers countered may be is indeed very questionable: Phantom with a second example, you can continue to fly just fine even if you do not update the software. Should the aviation police are able uploader Tollymaster 'to detect, it probably can expect a fine of several thousand euros.
Update (4-3-2016): now is the video removed by the user.
Update 2 (6-3-2016): the video appears to be available through vid.me.