Watch a Drone Save a Toy Helicopter in a Delicate Rescue Operation

​The classic board game Operation has met its high-tech match.

When a burst of wind sweeps a remote controlled copter onto a roof, what do you do? Rescue it with a drone, of course. That's what a YouTube user allegedly named Shawn Lewis did, documenting the impressive rescue.

According to the video's description, the "little RC copter" crashed onto an inaccessible roof, so Lewis called a friend to lend what looks like a DJI P​hantom drone with a GoPro strapped to it. It took them three tries, but with some precision handling and a carefully placed magnet, the mini chopper was rescued.

There aren't a lot of details known about the recovery effort. The video's title hints that it was a joint effort between "Matt at Bannerman," which could be a reference to the San Francisco s​tartup that provides event security on demand, and Beep, a "Wi-Fi computing platfor​m for audio" founded by Lewis, the video's poster.

Despite the fact that the video already has contact information for licensing—it's a certified original according to the YouTube licensing company Jukin Media—neither Lewis nor his licensing agents responded to a request for more details.

We do know one thing: these startup kids have too much time on their hands.

Update: Shawn Lewis got back to us via his licensing representative. Here's the full backstory:

Steve, our Electrical Engineer at Beep, had bought a relatively cheap ($25) remote controlled helicopter, he received it on Monday 2/16. It's infrared controlled so it could only fly outdoors at night. We'd been having fun with it all day but decided to take it up for a roof flight after dusk. Of course we immediately decided to push the limits and see how high it could go. Joe (a software engineer at Beep), myself and Steve were up there, with Steve at the controls. Steve kept flying higher and higher, dangerously high! I started yelling to abort but it was too late. By the time the copter was out of range of the controller it was over someone else's roof, across an empty field, and it plummeted onto the skylight you see in the video with a thud.

We immediately starting discussing recovery options, and of course as engineers we thought, how about a bigger drone? Visions using larger and larger drones and more and more failed attempts only got us more excited. We had no larger drone though, so, disappointed we went home and went to bed.

Well, the very next morning there was a large package sitting in our office lobby. We share an office with another company called Bannerman, and someone told us that the package contained a large ($1k) drone, addressed to Matt from Bannerman. Perfect. We approached him with our rescue mission idea and he was immediately onboard. Matt's an amateur pilot so we knew we were in good hands, and to top it off the drone came with a camera we could point straight down and stream back in real-time! We spent a couple days prototyping different rescue techniques and doing practice runs in our back parking lot. We tried a hook on a string, a coat-hangar hook affixed directly to the bottom of the drone, we tried using the drone to coil a rope around the downed helicopter (well, we were using another tiny old drone we had lying around as a stand-in). But none of them seemed ideal, and we were worried about hooking something on the other roof and getting the larger, much more expensive drone stuck.

Finally on Thursday Rachel from Bannerman came up with the idea to use a magnet (at this point just about everyone was chipping in, who can resist a rescue mission?). We found a magnet in our lab and tied it to a rope. It easily attached to and held one of the rotors on our stand-in drone in a practice attempt out back. We were all set!

Finally we went up to the roof to give it a shot. There were maybe 6 to 8 of us up there providing mission support. In the first attempt we knocked the drone off the skylight but were unable to attach to it. When we brought the drone back we noticed there was a rock stuck to the magnet. That was going to be trouble. We tried a second time, this time it came back with even more rocks. We were about to give up but Matt realized that the rocks were probably from our own roof (which is covered in them), we were picking them up on the takeoff! So the third and final time I help the magnet until he got the drone into the air, so as not to pick any rocks up before getting airborne.