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In case anyone doesn’t notice this little detail... right in the last few seconds you can see one of the erupting chunks of lava pass out of the frame in the vertical direction. It looks like the drone made a lucky pass through the top of the erupting lava plume, narrowly missing red hot chunks of lava.

To clarify... it looks like that, can anyone more familiar with the original post confirm more details? Because it could obviously just have been a trick of the drone’s speed combined with the camera field of view just making it look like it whizzed under a chunk of red hot lava... which is still neat camera work... but it would be so much more awesome if it wasn’t just a camera effect and it actually did fly through between erupting chunks of lava.

It's not clear if the drone survived. The video is cut right after it should have been hit with the lava.

I would be worried the heat would melt the drone even if nothing hit it.

It survived, per a UK news interview with the pilot: https://youtu.be/dFUa8yAnD6s?t=77

I'm no expert but I don't know if you could recover the HD version of the footage without the drone coming home, perhaps only the FPV version. Happy to be corrected though.

With DJI FPV, you can get a recording of the HD signal in the goggles. It's not as good as a GoPro/action cam footage recorded on board, but infinitely better than what ground-recorded analog FPV footage looks like.

Also possible for the drone to fall into lava and still transmit for a few seconds, maybe enough to get the higher-quality buffer?

Highly unlikely you'd have time to transmit footage. Various chips in the drone would go into thermal shut down at 90 C ish. The lithium battery would probably explode shortly after.

The scene from Terminator II came into my mind!

the appropriate time scale would more likely be milliseconds

It's not so much that they're red hot it's that they're incredibly heavy. They weigh as much as rock, and they're sticky rocks as they're partially molten. So imagine throwing a rock covered in super glue at a drone and that's the right picture.

I could only think:

TOO LOW - TERRAIN! PULL UP! TOO LOW - TERRAIN! PULL UP!

haha, I really thought some magma might have hit the drone when the drone went over the cone.

I am surprised the drone survived (or did it?)

The drone might have streamed the video back to the operator, so it's not a given that the drone survived. Since the photographer knew they were going to take a risky shot, it's not even unlikely.

Maybe that's why the footage stops in the middle of the lava spray...

Perhaps a calculated risk, in case media outlets want to use the footage for anything the royalties might outweigh the cost of the drone. Would be wasteful though.

Drone pilot got really lucky with that fly past. Very risky, the reward was a great shot though.

He really went for it didn't he? A bit lower and it'd be toast

That and he flew through a shower of molten rock, the smallest little blob would take that drone out.

Some things are with the risk though, turned out amazing!

A bit higher too; there's a lump of lava that ended up above it.

Woah, it looks like a 3D render, surreal.

My first thought was that it could just as well have been a shot from Mustafar in Star Wars. Stunning video!

To me it looked like a demoscene clip.

Amazing shot - I wonder what a thermal image would look like of the same scene. Must be pretty hot flying over top of that lava.

I wonder how the drone looked afterwards

Have you ever burnt a resistor?

It likely looks like a 10 pound burned resistor.