Footage of an Australian Guy Fishing from a Drone Is Being Investigated by Authorities

Maybe you remember the guy who used a drone to airlift a sausage in bread from Bunnings Warehouse to the jacuzzi in his backyard. That now-famous incident was investigated back in 2016 by the Civil Aviation Safety Authority (CASA), who threatened the man with a $9,000 fine for breaching a number of air safety regulations regulations: including the use of a drone within 30 metres of people, use out of the line of sight, and use over a populous area. It’s not clear whether he was ever made to pay.

Anyway, that little incident was just a prelude; an entree. These days CASA’s got more important matters to attend to. Namely: figuring out whether a man using a homemade drone to lift himself into the air—before casting a line into a lake and reeling in what appears to be a live fish but is almost definitely a dead fish—is in breach of any aviation laws.

Footage uploaded to the UAV Me Facebook page this month shows a man in a cafe chair being carried several metres above the waters of Upper Coliban Reservoir in central Victoria: beer and fishing rod firmly in hand. The man casts out a line and appears to catch a fish from above before the drone carries him back to shore. And CASA doesn’t quite know what to make of it all.

"This is a first for Australia, to have a large homemade drone being used to lift someone off the ground," said CASA spokesman Peter Gibson, in conversation with the ABC. "It's really not a sensible thing to do in any way, shape, or form; there's lots of things that could have gone wrong, someone could have been seriously injured."

Gibson suggested that if the incident is found to be in severe breach of aviation regulations then it could result in penalties of more than $10,000 in fines. "It'll take some time for us to gather the information, analyse all that, [and] determine what the appropriate course of action is," he said.

While the drone-fishing stunt appears to have gone down without a hitch, Gibson speculated on the various ways in which it could have ended in disaster.

“For the person on the chair, the risk could be computer errors where the aircraft flies away, [or there] could be motor failures where the aircraft ends up in an uncontrollable state," he said.

"Best-case scenario is the battery sets die and it plonks straight into the water."

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