Watch a drone lose control and crash onto Apple Park’s solar roof

Drone flyovers have been offering us a look at the steady development of Apple Park — Apple’s striking new headquarters — ever since construction workers broke ground on the project a couple of years ago.

Monthly updates from the site in Cupertino, California, came from a number of drone pilots, among them Matthew Roberts, whose most recent outing revealed that Apple has pretty much completed work on its so-called “spaceship” campus, save for a bit of landscaping.

This week Roberts posted a flyover video that’s a little different to his usual work, as it tells the story of another pilot who recently lost his quadcopter while trying to capture footage of Apple Park.

The unnamed operator told Roberts that his machine suddenly fell from the sky during a flight, and asked if he could help him to locate it.

Roberts obliged, taking his own drone on a flight over the campus, this time on the hunt for another quadcopter rather than dramatic footage of the remarkable donut-shaped building that forms the centerpiece of Apple’s new headquarters.

Roberts’ video includes the actual crash footage (above), a cached version pulled from the pilot’s mobile device. It shows POV footage of the drone flying over the campus before suddenly and inexplicably falling from the sky and landing on Apple’s solar roof. Next, we see footage from Roberts’ drone as he goes in search of the precise location of the crashed machine. We discover it apparently intact and seemingly lodged in between some of the panels.

No attempt is made to recover the damaged drone, though we’ve seen it done before — some efforts more successful than others — using tethers and hooks.

During the construction phase of Apple Park, there were obviously far fewer people on site and many of the flyovers were made during quiet times of the week. Now with thousands of Apple employees wandering about the campus, the company may not be so happy to have drones flying overhead, with this latest episode highlighting how things can sometimes go badly wrong in the air.

You never know, if any more drones come down on the campus, we might start hearing reports of even more Apple employees walking into glass walls as they look skyward for the malfunctioning flying machines.