Australian Hobbyists Take a Drone Fishing Trip

Let’s face it: the list of hobbies that can’t be improved by introducing a drone is incredibly short.

That’s why we’ve seen drone-aided surfing, skydiving, skiing and hammock-sitting, among other things.

This week, footage has emerged from Australia that shows how a group of friends have adapted the tranquil sport of fishing with a human-carrying drone.

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“Nobody sells a human-lifting drone, so we thought we’d build our own…”

In the video above, the friends document their attempts to build a big (and stable enough) drone to carry a person. In the credits they thank Casey Neistat for the inspiration. Neistat famously collaborated with Samsung on a Christmas stunt in 2016 to build an octocopter powerful enough to lift a grown man in a Santa outfit off a mountain.

In true Aussie style, the friends decided to use their drone for a fishing expedition instead. Later in the video we see one of the crew sitting in a deck-chair while hanging from a rope attached to the drone. The drone flies out over a lake in the state of Victoria and the wait begins.

Sure enough, the flying fisherman gets a bite and reels in a fish while sipping on a beer – the chair has a beer holder attached, of course.

Once the fish is caught, man, beer and flying armchair are all flown back onto dry land where the celebrations begin.

This is a great example of hobbyists exploring the boundaries of what’s possible with drone technology and having fun with it at the same time. But it’s unlikely that Australia’s Civil Aviation Safety Authority will be taking such a positive view.

Spokesman Peter Gibson was quite right in pointing out the safety risks highlighted in the video. Although it’s not immediately clear whether any of the authority’s rules had been broken.

“This is a first for Australia, to have a large homemade drone being used to lift someone off the ground,” Gibson told ABC.

“It’s really not a sensible thing to do in any way, shape or form; there are lots of things that could have gone wrong, someone could have been seriously injured. It’ll take some time for us to gather the information, analyse all that, determine what the appropriate course of action is,” he said.