Keeping your gadgets charged is important. More and more our very lives are stored on our smartphones. If they die, we’re cut off our friends, work email, and Reddit. There’s also the nightmare of realising your drone’s battery is dying while it’s 50-feet above a body of water.
YouTuber redphive, an ironic reference to Luke Skywalker’s X-Wing call sign in this particular case, lived such a nightmare. In the 43-second drama that unfolds, which I found more exciting that many feature-length films, the pilot starts to panic around the 10 second mark, and then admirably jumps into action. At first he goes for the canoe, but quickly changes his mind. After a few precious moments of indecision and accidentally tossing his wallet in the lake around 17 seconds in, he successfully grabs the DJI Phantom 2 mere seconds before making a watery touchdown.
We’ll chalk this one up to a beginner’s slip-up as he admits in the video description that this was only his second time piloting the drone. But let this be a PSA for all of us — batteries are important, especially when piloting a several hundred dollar quadcopter over a large body of water. [Reddit]