Watch: This skydiver gloriously jumped from a drone. Others like him could soon be saving lives
The next frontier in adventure sports in the sky?
If you thought a drone making home deliveries was an inspired idea, well, take a look at what drones are up to now. A Latvian company, Aerones, decided to test a somewhat wilder idea: to film the first ever drone jump in the world. And it looks really quite marvellous.
The slickly-produced video pans across the glorious Latvian landscape and all the meticulous preparation for the experiment before settling on the precious feat itself: the drone taking off from a small water body, flying up, and in a heart-stopping moment, skydiver Ingus Augstkalns being lifted up in the air by the 28-propeller aerial vehicle. And then, that neat jump from a height of 1,082 feet. Applause.
This particular drone, said reports, specialises in heavy-lifting and can easily work with weights up to 100 kilograms. It took Aerones six months and several rounds of testing to pull off the jump.
The stunt wasn’t, however, intended just for social media popularity.
“In the near future, our technology will save human lives, will help fight fires and carry out other challenging and significant work,” Jānis Putrāms, the chief engineer of Aerones responsible for piloting the drone, told the Daily Mail. “With this project, we show that we are ready for serious tasks in the field of civil defence and sports.”