Don’t fly over national parks, or a police helicopter will blow you out of the sky (literally)

Brian Needle was out flying his DJI Phantom 2 quadcopter at Great Falls National Park, when suddenly a full-scale police helicopter shows up. The helicopter then tries to attack by hovering directly over the Phantom in order to blow it into the rocky river. Since quadcopters are so stable, the Helicopter was unable to blow the Phantom out of the sky. Brian then headed back to where he took off from. The helicopter continued to follow behind him until getting back to the observation area, where it was too dangerous to keep going. After landing the Phantom, the police had already arrived. He was detained shortly after and was interrogated for about an hour before finally being let go. The fine for doing this was 70 dollars (which actually seems a bit low for something that involves a police helicopter).

If you didn’t already know, it’s illegal to operate any RC aircraft in a national park, which is why Brian was arrested for flying over the river. There’s also a “no fly zone” in Washington DC thats located on the Reagan National Airport and has a 10 nautical mile radius. Luckily, where he was flying was a couple miles past that, so he didn’t get in trouble.

Even though drones are illegal to fly in a state/national park, I don’t think that using a police helicopter was at all necessary.

The video

In the youtube video, the helicopter can be seen blowing the phantom around at 3:40 and comes into frame at 4:08.