Drone video features a whacked pilot taking off in a DJI Agras T40

The different use cases being found for UAVs seem as inexhaustible as they are diverse. And now, to that list of mostly productive and pragmatic innovations, a video adds the unabashedly goofy repurposing of a DJI agricultural drone as a personal aircraft (and/or toy).

A homemade video currently making the rounds of social media provides new evidence (were any needed) of how people will invariably subjugate sophisticated and highly efficient technological innovations to the higher cause of satisfying their basest desires. In it, a hooded individual waddles around wedged into a plastic container he eventually uses for a seat as he lifts himself off in a DJI Agras T40 agricultural drone.

Though deployment a DJI drone designed for spraying farm crops that might otherwise be decimated by ravenous pests as personal aerial amusement may have required considerable thinking outside of the box (though just where is a matter of debate), the video’s creator was a bit less creative in naming his film. 

“Agricultural Drone DJI T40 @DJI” is all he came up with.

The video was brought to DroneDJ’s attention by a longtime reader known as Trucker Beetle Bailey. Though it has resurfaced in different, usually lame revisions since it was first posted in September of last year, the original video of a weird guy lifting off in a DJI T40 drone is as bizarrely entertaining as TBB clearly knew it would be. 

The video opens with the pilot approaching the UAV crammed into the UAV’s plastic container designed for holding crop dusting liquid – holes apparently cut out of the bottom to jam his legs through. His face obscured by his hoodie – what on earth might he be ashamed of? – the subject is next seen settled into the middle of the large DJI aggie drone, legs resting on the ground as he fiddles with the RC preparing takeoff. 

The footage closes out with the craft lifting off and hovering about six feet off the ground, smoothness and stability being a feature of neither phase.

No other imagery or information is provided about the video, which leaves the viewer charitably hoping the pilot was able to land the XXL DJI drone with a lighter touch than he took off and hovered, and avoided the probable knee-capping he’d have given his folded legs otherwise.

Image: Karl Greif/Unsplash