How a T-Shirt Took Down a $1K Drone

That's one way to tell the world you're fed-up with drones
By Elizabeth Armstrong Moore,  Newser Staff
Posted Jun 11, 2015 7:11 AM CDT

Mike Luzanksy, owner of Lucky 7 Drones—an online company that sells drones and accessories and just moved from Las Vegas to Huntington Beach, Calif.—was on a quiet residential street filming a demonstration video of the small DJI Phantom 3 Professional Quadcopter last week around 6pm when a bare-chested local man approached. The drone was a few feet off the ground and the man swatted at it with his T-shirt, sending it tumbling to its untimely death. "It hit his leg, hit the cement, smashed the camera, the blades, and messed up the copter," Luzanksy tells ABC 7. The incident was caught on a video in which the guy can be heard telling the team not to fly the drone "over my house" and a Lucky 7 team member is heard calling the guy "drunk."

Luzanksy has already filed a police report and visited the man's house to ask that he pay for the damage to the $1,350 drone. The police, who along with Luzanksy have yet to name the neighbor, say he was complaining of privacy infringement and told them his identity had recently been stolen, reports the Huntington Beach Independent. But Luzansky says they weren't flying the drone over anyone's house or near windows. The YouTube video of the incident—in which the neighbor can also be heard saying "I don't even think that's legal"—has logged more than 324,000 views; Lucky 7's description of the video accuses the guy of being "EXTREMELY inebriated" at the time. So far no arrests have been made. (Here's one reason we may soon be seeing more drones than ever.)

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