Drone pilot accidentally discovers woman stranded on the beach, helps saving her life 

When Josh Hug went to California’s Pacifica Beach to do some drone filming, little did he know that he would save a life. As he got his drone up in the air, he noticed someone lying on the beach, apparently unconscious. He left his controller and rushed to help, but his drone kept filming and the whole situation was caught on camera.

Josh Hug is a professor at UC Berkeley. On the day of the incident, he fired up his drone to shoot the high surf on the beach. However, he noticed something that made him stop what he was doing and rush to help. “I noticed that there was somebody who looked like they had just gotten owned by a wave, right,” he told WFLA News Channel 8. “Somebody with a dog, and they seemed to be rolling with the wave.”

Hug left his controller and rushed there to find a woman who wasn’t able to move. Her dog was beside her, jumping around nervously. “As I was trying to help her up she just couldn’t move,” Hug said. “She was incapacitated in some way.” This is when he realized that it was a matter of life or death.

As he was trying to keep the woman away from the waves, more people rushed to help. And since his drone was still hovering in the air, it filmed the entire event. It landed at one point, but it continued to film from the ground. Hug and the two other men dragged the woman away from the waves to safety.

Jeff Huntze, Battalion Chief with North County Fire Authority said that Hug was a hero. Huntze and a team of rescuers arrived at the scene minutes after the woman was pulled from the water, according to NBC Bay Area. “If nobody had come that day she would have succumbed to the water,” he concluded.

[via Drone DJ]