Adam Drake bought his first drone when he was in China in 2008. He was walking through the Beijing airport when he heard buzzing and saw a clerk flying what looked like a tiny helicopter with multiple rotors around the narrow store. Though in his late twenties, Adam was a kid at heart, and at the time was a copywriter for an advertising agency, specializing in packaged goods, specifically candy. Adam was the kind of guy who made the fun commercials that would crack you up—a caveman who does his own taxes, a waterskiing squirrel who loves chocolate—that kind of thing. So a flying toy that reminded him of his favorite remote control car from childhood was a no-brainer. He bought one of the devices, took it home, set it up, and promptly crashed it.
His girlfriend at the time could only shake her head. “That was three thousand Chinese yuan you just flew into our wall.”
“Test flight,” Adam said, picking up the pieces. “I’ll figure it out eventually.”
And he did, and the drone technology got better. More sensitive gimbals created steadier flight patterns; innovations and battery technology allowed for faster, longer flights, and artificial intelligence programmed into the drones themselves allowed many of the high-end commercially available drones to fly themselves, navigating through spaces with the kind of precision that even a hummingbird does not possess.
Along with his growing passion for drone technology, Adam developed an equally strong interest in photography. Photography and drones made for a happy union, which was good for Adam, who now had a wife and daughter, as he could enjoy both hobbies at the same time. And so it wasn’t long before he bought his first drone equipped with a high-quality camera. “But honey,” he told his wife when she saw the credit card bill, “now we can take a family photo from the air, in front of our house.”
But that wasn’t all Drake captured. There were sunsets and boats skimming along the East River and Long Island Sound, nature areas, rocky hides, sweeping majestic marshes with birds in flight—all of these screen savers his wife saw playing over and over on their TV, the sheer magnitude of them only made bearable by images of their baby girl.
The hobby had even become a family affair. Adam flew his drone at the park, his daughter cooing in a carrier strapped to his chest. So he spent many happy mornings, walking with a baby and a flying photo studio. He’d left the big agency, quite thankful to no longer be at someone else’s beck and call. He ran his own small agency, and though there was more freedom, it did not eliminate the presence of overbearing clients, but at least Adam himself was allowed to decide when to react.
And so when Monday mornings rolled around, before he dropped his daughter off at daycare or his wife slipped out of their Brooklyn apartment to catch the train to Manhattan, Adam could sit on the roof of their brownstone in the predawn darkness in an ever-present attempt to capture the perfect sunrise.
On one particular morning, at two thousand feet in the air, a good thousand feet from max range and a solid two miles from any flight path, the drone he’d affectionately named Kitty was hovering, snapping photographs that Adam could see on his cell phone, which served as the viewfinder. The city, just starting to step into the electric morning all in stunning 4K HD. From the baby monitor in his pocket, Adam could hear his daughter, now three, singing in her crib. He squinted into the sky, hoping to see Kitty, but he knew the drone was too far away to be visible. After years of training his ear to the pitch, he could just barely hear the buzz in the distance and worked the toggles on the transmitter, bringing the drone home like an electric dog. He didn’t need to see it, he knew how to guide it in, but something was wrong. He knew the direction Kitty should be flying in, but he could see from the camera that she was going in the opposite way—flying northeast instead of southwest. And then, something even more worrisome occurred: the drone began to sharply descend, speeding toward the ground.
Beep, beep, beep. The device blared a warning signal. He hit the auto “return to home” button, but nothing happened. He’d always felt perfectly safe with Kitty in the air, but now, he was panged with uncertainty, imagining the two-pound hunk of plastic falling from a couple thousand feet and hitting someone on the sidewalk below. A proverbial penny dropping off the Empire State Building. His mind reeled, trying to recall facts from an old physics class—wasn’t terminal velocity 53 m/s?
But then Kitty leveled off and continued in a northeast direction. Adam shook the controller. “What the hell’s happening?” Again he worked the toggles, but the drone still would not respond. The camera went black somewhere between the Queens Zoo and LaGuardia.
“Babe, what’s going on?” Adam turned to see his wife standing behind him.
“I’m not sure … I think I lost it.” He looked out at the skyline, the intense oranges of sunrise now dissipated into the haze of a regular day. He held up the transmitter. The screen was off. “It was flying that way…” Adam pointed off into the distance, vaguely aware of an airport he flew in and out of all the time, some ten miles away as the crow flies. Then Adam had another, perhaps more disturbing thought: before the camera cut out, he saw what looked like geese, flying in the V formation like tiny dots somewhere in the airspace below Kitty, but he wasn’t positive that’s what they were. He couldn’t put his finger on it, but he had photographed enough wild birds to know that these weren’t quite right, that there was something almost mechanical about their wing movement.