This is a great video and story, your are going to love the view from the top.
With one careful step after another, Schmidt made his ascent, climbing 1,500 feet above southeastern South Dakota’s quilted prairie before ultimately reaching his summit. At the very top of a now-defunct television tower — a casualty of the switch from analog to digital broadcasting — Schmidt completed his climb with a fairly ordinary task.
He changed a lightbulb.
For Schmidt, who’s been performing work on towers of all kinds for eight years, it was “just another day at the office.” But the moment is suddenly getting all sorts of attention because it was captured by a drone, and the video has now gone viral.
As an employee at Sioux Falls Tower & Communications, Schmidt does everything from putting up towers to taking them down. He also performs regular maintenance like the lightbulb change, a requirement by the Federal Aviation Administration to alert oncoming airplanes. On some days, Schmidt will climb as many as eight towers. It’s such a normal part of his job that while perched atop this particular tower outside of Salem, South Dakota, he casually snapped a selfie.
The drone video was produced by Prairie Aerial, a group that was launched last year and bills itself as “the premier professional aerial photography and videography outfit in the Great Plains region of the United States.”
Prairie Aerial has produced several other drone-captured videos, but none have made as big of a splash as the one titled “1500′ TV Tower.” It was posted on YouTube in November, but it’s only realized its viral potential this week. On Sunday, the video of Schmidt’s lightbulb change had around 250,000 views. As of Tuesday morning, that number had eclipsed 600,000.
