from the left,-right,-no-left,-too-late dept.
A New York City teacher and photographer has been ordered to serve five days of community service after he crashed a drone into the stands at the US Open last month.
In a statement released Friday, Queens District Attorney Richard Brown described the defendant, Daniel Verley, as having "cooperated fully with the police."
Brown added that Verley, who has no prior criminal record, "never intended to allow his drone to fly into the stadium and that he, in fact, lost control of the drone. Fortunately, no one was injured as a result of this incident."
Flushing Meadows Corona Park in Queens, where Arthur Ashe Stadium is located, is huge and once hosted the World's Fair. It also contains the New York Hall of Science where Maker Faire happens, the giant metal globe, and the UFO towers that many will recognize from Men in Black. It is a fitting place to fly a drone.
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Daniel Verley, 26, faces charges of reckless endangerment and operating a drone in a New York City public park outside of prescribed area. A police department spokesman said Verley was a teacher at the Academy of Innovative Technology in Brooklyn. Calls for comment to the school and the Department of Education were not immediately returned Friday. It wasn't immediately clear if Verley had an attorney who could comment on the charges on his behalf.
The drone buzzed over the court in Louis Armstrong Stadium on Thursday night before crashing into the seats. U.S. Tennis Association spokesman Chris Widmaier said no one was injured. The black device flew diagonally through the arena during the next-to-last game of a second-round match that 26th-seeded Flavia Pennetta of Italy won 6-1, 6-4 over Monica Niculescu of Romania.
Pennetta said she heard the drone fly by and was not sure what it was. Her initial reaction, she said afterward, was that it might have been a bomb. "A little bit scary, I have to say," Pennetta said. "With everything going on in the world ... I thought, `OK, it's over.' That's how things happen," she said. She said neither the chair umpire nor tournament officials told her that it was, indeed, a drone.
It broke into pieces upon landing, and the match was only briefly interrupted between points while police and fire department personnel went to look at it. "The chair umpire just wanted to wait for an OK from the police to be able to continue," Pennetta said, "even if, truthfully, I don't think even they knew what it was."
She said her coach and physical therapist were sitting in the opposite end of the stadium from where the drone crashed and they told her later they were afraid, too. "All of these (security measures), and then it comes in from above," Pennetta said.
Also at BBC, NPR, and Ars. According to the FAA, drone use is forbidden within 5 miles of an airport, and Louis Armstrong Stadium is 4.2 miles from LaGuardia Airport.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Friday October 09 2015, @03:00PM
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/09/man-arrested-for-allegedly-crashing-drone-into-stands-at-us-open/ [arstechnica.com]
According to the Federal Aviation Administration, drone use is forbidden within five miles of an airport—Louis Armstrong Stadium sits 4.2 miles from LaGuardia Airport.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday October 09 2015, @03:28PM
He lost control. We knew that when it crashed. The question is, when and where did he lose control? The claim appears to be that he lost control well before it entered the stadium. Somehow - that seems a little to convenient. I'm not going to call the man an outright liar, but it seems kinda shaky.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Thexalon on Friday October 09 2015, @03:50PM
I'm guessing we'll never know exactly, but wherever he lost control the results seem a lot more like a stupid mistake than anything else. The sentence seems fair enough to me: If he was trying to, for example, get a view of the games without paying for a ticket, then he's already paid the financial penalty by having his drone wrecked, and the community service tacks on a fairly minor criminal penalty.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Phoenix666 on Friday October 09 2015, @05:27PM
Sadly the Google Streetview doesn't extend to the park surrounding the stadium to illustrate, but you can kind of get a sense from this image [wikia.com]. Arthur Ashe Stadium is in the upper left corner with the blue seats. In other words it sits in the middle of a huge park, exactly the kind of place where a person would go to fly a drone in NYC to minimize the chances of causing mischief.
Besides, the only people who go to watch tennis there are upper class WASPs from Westchester County or the Long Island suburbs and they drive in and can afford tickets. Locals who would go to that park to fly drones are vastly more likely to want to spy on the action at Citi Field (the stadium in the upper right of the same photo), if spying on sports is their intent. Even if it's the Mets.
Washington DC delenda est.