The advent of drones have seen people come up with different ways of using them, and earlier this July, a drone user actually crashed one drone into Yellowstone’s Grand Prismatic Spring. That drone user happened to be Andreas Meissner, a 37 year old German national, who was operating an unmanned aircraft known as the Phantom 2 before it plummeted shortly after takeoff because of a power loss.
It is a good thing that a diver managed to recover the attached GoPro camera as well as memory card after the drone crashed. This particular crash would not have resulted in any prosecution had it not happen earlier than June 20th this year, since that was when U.S. National Parks introduced a blanket ban across use of any and every kind of unmanned aircraft.
Meissner pled guilty to all three charges that were leveled against him, and the U.S. Attorney’s Office had agreed to drop one of the charges – the one where he gave a false report to a government employee. Apart from that, there was the option of serving a year’s worth of probation in Germany in lieu of a possible jail sentence. There is also a fine that amounts to over $1,600 since it is an unsupervised probation.
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