That's just a stock photo of a drone.
No-one photographed the drone involved.
Greetings all
Actually Meta4 the drone in question was captured briefly by a local news crew from a distance as it finished filming and turned to RTH. It was a DJI Mavic although exact model was not obvious at that distance.
It was stated that the pilot was capturing footage for sale to local media outlets so the claim that the pilot was "unidentified" has to be taken with a grain of salt too or how would they know what he was doing? Of course you can't expect the local media to make that too well known. They were getting too much mileage out of the drone beat up.
Please don't mistake me. The guy was an utter idiot and someone we can do without in the hobby. Australian RPAS operators have been working under rules very VERY similar to those ushered in by the new FAA re financing bill in the U.S. for quite a while and we get bye OK for the most part. There are rules that are very specific for recreational drone uav pilots but have some wriggle room for certified pilots.
To be clear, I live close to the location and know it well, I've fished the seaway, gone out to sea via the seaway and volunteered at VMR tower on the seaway. A close friend is still an air sea rescue skipper there.
It is not controlled airspace from memory (I could check by simply opening CASA's "can I fly there app") and so could the idiot in question. There are any number of uncontrolled helicopter sites (UHLS) in the area but when not in use even a recreational pilot can fly very close to them with the proviso that they must land as soon as they become aware of an aircraft operating from the UHLS.
The only rule being breached that I can obviously see is that "you must not operate within the area of an emergency situation without permission from the person in overall control of the situation". If the operator had checked the "can I fly there" app it would have sown him the UHLS sites and boundry and most likely have shown an emergency was underway.
I am currently studying for RePL and AROC certification, an operator with those *may* have been able to film there at that time as his AROC would have allowed him to request permission from the situation controller and co ordinate with the heli pilot via airband radio but would still have had to keep 1500m horizontally and 500ft vert away from the heli when it arrived. It's by no means certain but possible under the legislation.
In the end it highlights two things, all the regulations in the world don't change anything if drop kicks won't follow them, and the media are hypocritical in that they will take footage from anyone (recreational sub 2Kg pilots can operate under "exempt" status commercially here}. If the media made a commitment to only take footage from certified RePL operators who are not going to risk there expensive to obtain licence you have to ask would it even have happened?
Finally as others have said, anti drone measures exist, it's time they were made standard equipment to the emergency services and just take the idiots out of the air.
