Community Creator Dan Harmon Reunited Lost Drone With Owner via Twitter
Reunited and it feels so good.
On Tuesday, Dan Harmon, the creator of the NBC sitcom Community came to the rescue of a downed drone he’d found in his yard. Through Twitter, he was able to locate its owner. Though the popular social-media platform can often be a place of cruelty and negativity, this story is sure to reaffirm the goodness of humanity in us all and place Harmon in the drone community’s "good" book (not that we have such a thing).
The last time we reported on a missing drone, it regarded a team of Indonesian volcanologists that lost contact with a $45,000 gas sensor-equipped unmanned aerial vehicle during a mission to analyze the various types of smoke near Mount Agung in Bali. Though that was certainly a heavy loss for the Bali Volcanology and Geological Disaster Mitigation Center (PVMBG), losing a drone is never easy, regardless of how reasonably priced or inordinately expensive it is. The 24-year-old who’d lost and accidentally crashed his UAV on Harmon’s lawn on New Year’s Eve, by piloting drunkenly (of course) was certainly overjoyed to be reunited with his DJI Phantom 3.
Let’s take a look at this Twitter drone saga, shall we?
This is the initial tweet Harmon published on Tuesday, publicly announcing that he was now in possession of a mysterious, "pricey looking drone" he'd like to return, particularly because of his aversion to proving parents right, of course. The follow-up tweet, which seems simultaneously obvious in hindsight yet somehow deeply poignant, compared drones to their non-motorized predecessors.
According to Mashable, Twitter user Amy Scarlata, who knowingly lived in the same Los Angeles neighborhood as Harmon, saw the showrunner's tweet and quickly remembered something of note: she saw a sign for a lost drone in a nearby park. After relaying this information to Harmon, Scarlata admitted "I'm obsessed with an internet sleuthing challenge," Scarlata said. "DH lives in my hood so I know his area and felt like I could figure it out." This obsession brought Scarlata to a neighborhood, community-focused message board called NextDoor.com. "I get Nextdoor emails every day, and besides home invasions and other terrifying stuff it's all lost and found pets and objects, so it was my first instinct," she said. This little bit of neighborly effort was key in reuniting the UAV with its owner - she had found the pilot online, and redirected him to Harmon's Twitter page.
After 24-year old Angelino Conor drunkenly piloted his drone out of sight and out of his life, he surely felt it was gone for good. He put signs up, hoping that somebody had seen it, with the vague nebulous notion that surely, a good samaritan out there would help. Fortunately for him and everyone involved, including us spectators, that is exactly what happened. We all get a vicarious sense of human kindness from this story. The drone is just the cherry on top. Be good to each other, and fly responsibly.
