Hot take: That 'drone spotted over airport' video was too clean to be real

I was scrolling through Reddit last night and saw this viral clip of a drone hovering right over a runway at O'Hare. The camera work was super smooth, no wind wobble, and the drone was dead silent in the audio. I used to fly FPV drones back in 2021 and that whole thing felt staged. But then someone in the comments said it was from a safety drill video the FAA put out in 2023. So which is it, a real sighting or a repurposed training clip? Has anyone dug into the metadata of that original upload?

3 comments

3 Comments

amy_west19d ago

That training clip idea makes a lot of sense when you look at the metadata. Someone on another forum ran a quick exif check on the original upload and found the creation date was from March 2023, not last week. The file size was also unusually small for a 4K clip, like it had been compressed for a government handout. Also the flight path itself seemed too perfect, no sudden corrections or altitude wobbles. Real drone operators flying near an airport would be nervous and jerky, not this smooth. So yeah, that video was almost certainly a repurposed safety demonstration, not some rogue operator.

nancyg1419d agoMost Upvoted

A buddy of mine works at a news station and he told me they get these safety demos all the time. He said they archive them with weird naming codes and tiny file sizes just like that one. One time they accidentally aired an old demo of a fake car crash and people called in freaking out. He laughed about it but said the metadata always gives it away. So yeah, this tracks with what he told me.

nancyg1419d agoMost Upvoted

Oh man, that is too funny about the car crash demo! My friend actually works in news too and he told me a similar story. He said they once aired a "breaking news" clip during a slow day that was actually a training video from like 2019. The station got flooded with calls from people who thought a building had collapsed downtown. He said the producer was mortified but everyone else thought it was hilarious. Apparently the metadata on that one had the wrong timezone too, which is how they finally figured it out. So yeah, these demos get mixed up all the time and it always ends up being something silly like this.