I would not read too much into it. For some reason, popular media loves to refer particularly to inventors or entrepreneurs in this way.

Among the first things we learn from the media about people like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg is that they dropped out of college, and Albert Einstein did badly at school -- doesn't even matter if it's true or not! I don't know where this silliness comes from, but it's not usually intended to be derogatory or have any real relationship to the story being reported at all.

And you're right, you don't need to have graduated highschool to know this was stupid and dangerous.

I’m with the sibling commentators- this phrasing is generally complimentary in the American press. It’s kind of strange cultural norm, but it’s a celebration of the “self made” aspect of what the person accomplished, not a denigration of his education level.

Perhaps it was not meant derisively but as an acknowledgement of his dedication and persistence to his goal? It's a popular meme - the school / college dropout that builds something in his garage ....

> That's a mighty odd description that has nothing to do with the incident

Being a high school drop-out is the reason he was killed. If he had been to a 4 year course in Mechanical engineering, he would be exposed to a lot of knowledge about the complexities of building machines

What a weird way of looking at things. With that frame of mind, I could explain all the issues I've had ever. "Oh, I hit that wall on the way out from the parking? Too bad I didn't have a racing education, then it would have been prevented" and blame it on lack of education.

The reason he was killed was because the main rotor hit his head. It did so because it wasn't following safety precautions. None of that has anything to do with his formal education.

The main rotor hit his head -> Because it suffered a material/design/ structural failure -> Because design validation or material quality checks or weld quality NDT checks or bolt sizing or balancing or lateral vibration suppression or a million other things were not checked -> Because you need to know to do that, and those are taught in an engineering course.

Even if you know that, failures still happen all the time because as you state, there are thousand things that could go wrong and this task could be too much for a single person.

Your answer sounds typical of someone who has never tried to accomplish anything meaningful. No shade to you personally. I have a bias and a healthy respect for people who make things with their hands, and in their own way, move humanity one step forward physically. Tangibly. My own work as a software developer seems puny and inconsequential.

The worlds best engineers with Billions of dollars in multi-year budgets, who know about and exposed to a lot of knowledge about "complexities of building machines"...even they fall short.

[Space Shuttle Columbia disaster](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Columbia_disas...)

Spot the difference?

The engineers of Columbia are probably still alive after that monumental fuck up. Did anyone question their credentials? Education? What high school they went to? What modules they took on their mech engineering classes?

The hypocrisy of attributing a failure to a lack of education is morally inept at best, and disingenuos at worst.

But my fear is more base. My fear is that the man is from a third world country and that your answer might be drawing an already unfair conclusion from that fact. I hope my fears are wrong and you are just being objectively pessimistic.

There are lots of highly educated people in the world who have been exposed to lots of knowledge in their field and still don't adhere to best practices/common sense or even the most basic understanding of their discpline they were taught. So no, we can't say this is what killed him.

True. His ignorance proved fatal.

No, it's a compliment in this context. Like, look what he managed to do even though he's a high-school dropout.

EDIT> I mean, before he got himself killed.