Firefighters were still unloading debris from the scene of Wednesday's explosion in East Harlem that killed seven people and injured dozens when a three-pound DJI Phantom 2 quadcopter drone began buzzing above the wreckage.
The owner, Brian Wilson, 45, a business systems analyst who has been flying drones for more than two years, says he was just there to collect footage and show how drones can be useful in a dangerous situation. Some thought Wilson was reckless for flying over an area still loaded with rescue personnel — given that a mechanical glitch could have caused it to plummet toward the ground.
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"I wasn’t there to get publicity,” Wilson told Mashable. “I came over there just to get footage, to see what happened and survey the area.” Drones, Wilson said, provide a great way to get video and photos from scenes too dangerous for people to get close to.
But some of his colleagues in the drone community are not so enthusiastic.
“I thought it was rather reckless," Matthew Schroyer, founder of the Professional Society of Drone Journalists, told Mashable. “I think you need to consider the possibility that it could drop out of the sky at any moment and land on an emergency responder or someone who was already injured by the blast.”
Technical malfunctions could have sent Wilson's drone on a wild flightpath, Schroyer said, and drones are already difficult to pilot in cities because buildings and other obstructions can make it hard for the remote control to pick up the drone's GPS signal. Without a lock on the GPS, it could fly in any direction.
“You don’t have any idea about the kind of radio interference you’re running into in that area," Schroyer said.
Wilson, 45, said he's flown his quadcopter for hundreds of hours, and is always careful to avoid people. His drone has never malfunctioned, according to him, let alone crashed. But Wilson also admitted that he'd never flown in an environment like that — where firefighters, police officers and other emergency personnel were swarming the scene of an explosion.
A police officer asked him to stop flying after the drone had been in the air for around 30 minutes, and Wilson landed the tiny aircraft without argument. But legally speaking, he could have stayed airborne.
The Federal Aviation Administration hasn't issued any legislation that embraces or restricts civilian drone use. If Wilson had refused to take down his drone, the officer wouldn't have had the right to force the situation.
Schroyer thinks the lack of a regulation is almost inviting an accident to occur. "We didn’t ever want to operate in a regulation-free environment," Schroyer said, speaking on behalf of his organization. 
“We wanted consistent, fair, safe regulations, and when you don’t have those, you give more reasons for people like that photographer to go out and fly in dangerous situations.”
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