CITYSCAPES Drone pilot explores Korea's hardest-to-reach places

Drone Explorer surveils an abandoned water treatment plant from high up in a video titled "Water Treatment Plant - abandoned after a test run" uploaded on Oct. 19. Courtesy of Drone Explorer

A drone comes out of rural Korea's clear blue sky and descends into a lush green valley. Its motor makes an angry loud whirring sound, like a lawnmower crossed with a jet engine, but no one's around to hear it. It circles the area and then approaches a building that appears derelict, with all the doors on the ground floor locked tight. But that hardly presents an obstacle for this mechanical visitor; it finds an open window and slips right inside.

Somewhere in the vicinity, a man wearing a futuristic-looking visor looks on, the drone's controller. He didn't want his real name published, asking to be identified instead as "Drone Explorer," which is how he introduces himself on his YouTube channel, @droneexplorer. The narration in his videos is computer generated, leaving his identity a mystery. Only sometimes his hands appear in the video when he has to handle the drone.

"I’d prefer to hide my identity so that I can keep visiting crazy places," he told The Korea Times. "It’s my hobby which I prefer to maintain that way. I believe it won’t be fun anymore when I consider it as something more serious."

Drone Explorer displays his equipment, which includes a DJI Avata drone, mousepad runway and cat treats. Courtesy of Drone Explorer

After one year, Drone Explorer has already released 111 videos, giving viewers breathtaking scenes of notable abandoned sites across Korea, such as a former Japanese airfield, a mental hospital with a dark history and a water treatment plant that he said was closed when nearby residents complained of odors.

"In general, abandoned places are forgotten and unknown, but they contain memories of someone," he said. "It reminds me that everything has an end; I’ve been to many places that had a glorious past. Business was good, lots of people visited there, but now it’s empty and forgotten."

He also sees a need for documenting these places, to remind humanity of its failures and urge it to do better. "There are places where people were tortured or exploited, even in the 21st century," he said. "In many cases, justice is not served, and people are not properly compensated. I think we should not forget such tragedies."

One such site he was referring to was the mental hospital he visited on a remote island, which he said was, in reality, a slave labor camp, where patients — many of whom he said hadn't required psychiatric care and had been sold into the system by family members — were forced to work in salt evaporation ponds and nearby farms.

The hospital was closed in the 1990s following several investigative reports. "But patients couldn’t return to normal life, as it required consent from the families who sold them in the first place. The responsible people were never fully punished for all of their crimes. The former owner of the institution went to jail for 18 months, but was not charged with murder or anything serious."

Drone Explorer looks out from inside an abandoned mental hospital on an island off Korea's west coast in this video titled "Unescapable hell: Abandoned mental hospital" uploaded Sept. 26. Courtesy of Drone Explorer

The Drone Explorer channel has attracted almost 1,200 followers, which is a modest number, or perhaps more accurately a discreet amount. He says he has "mixed feelings" about his videos receiving attention.

"On the one hand, I’d of course enjoy more people watching my channel," he said. "But on the other hand, when any abandoned place becomes popular, it is destined to be vandalized by someone."

He calls this "the life cycle of an abandoned place."

He explained, "When a building gets abandoned and forgotten, it sometimes gets noticed by an explorer. If it is interesting enough, it will gradually become famous. The more fame it gets, it is likely to be vandalized and draw the attention of the authorities; its lifecycle ends when it is deconstructed."

He cited one time when a popular YouTuber recommended he visit an abandoned veterinary hospital. But by the time he got there, all the entrances had been shuttered, making entry impossible — at least to the average person. "Luckily, the second floor was still open, so I still managed to explore the building with my drone," he said.

Drone Explorer visits a hard-to-reach abandoned resort on Jeju Island. Courtesy of Drone Explorer

Exploring by drone certainly has its advantages.

Drone Explorer says his drone helps with scouting out a location to see if it really is deserted and safe to visit. "The drone is useful in terms of recon. I typically fly my drone from a distance first to check if it is really abandoned. I had many cases of so-called abandoned places, which were actually not abandoned at all. I can always pack up and move on to the next site when I see people are in the location," he said.

He mentioned one time that actually happened, when he attempted to approach a citadel belonging to the controversial Providence church, which received international attention earlier this year when it was featured in the Netflix documentary "In the Name of God: A Holy Betrayal."

"The video became the most viewed one on my channel," he said. "Many followers left threatening comments. Nothing happened, of course."

He emphasized that he always tries to be respectful of privacy. "All abandoned places are someone’s private property," he emphasized.

He said when visiting a location, he sometimes encounters people nearby or inside.

"In most cases, they don’t mind when I say hello and politely explain I’m here to look around with my drone," he said. "In rare cases, people are hostile. Once, an old man living in a container right beside an abandoned hotel told me to go away. At first, I thought, ‘What the hell, does he think he owns this lot?’ But I chose not to fight and move on. A week later, another channel interviewed the guy. Turns out he really was the owner of the hotel, once very rich but now poor."

Drone Explorer visits an abandoned factory in this video titled "Suzume should visit this Korean Abandoned Factory" uploaded on May 4. Courtesy of Drone Explorer

As well as figuring out if a site is worth deploying the drone to, another advantage Drone Explorer enjoys is that he can reach locations that others can only dream of seeing.

"One such case was an island 1 kilometer out from the shore," he said. "I wanted to check there because I saw an unusual object from the satellite view. It turned out to be a deserted hovercraft, pretty much intact as no vandal could reach it."

But at the same time, drone exploration "brings a very different challenge to urbex (urban exploration)," he said.

"First of all, you rely on visual image from the drone camera only — you can’t hear, smell or feel the environment. And the camera’s view is not wide enough, so you need to remember what kind of obstacles are located where when you move backwards or sideways."

He also added that he is limited by technical features such as battery power, giving a typical flight time of 10 minutes maximum, as well as signal connection difficulties.

"The connection could abruptly cut off, depending on the structure or materials of construction," he said. "If I can’t see what the drone is seeing, or can’t control the drone, the drone is likely to crash."

This has happened a number of times, and he's shared videos of some of his problems and failures, including his first crash and a sensor malfunction that led to a wall collision in a funeral home. In the former case, he had to run in on foot to recover the drone, and in the second case, he activated "turtle mode" to get the drone out of there. One time, he had to brave spider webs and unnerving art displays to rescue his drone when it crashed inside an abandoned summer camp. In another case, he encountered an unexplained signal interference in an abandoned house, and had to navigate the drone out carefully.

Drone Explorer encounters signal interference in an abandoned house in a video titled "Strong Signal Interference in the Abandoned House," uploaded Feb. 20. Courtesy of Drone Explorer

Of course, when it comes to flying drones, Korea is not the most inviting country, with a couple dozen military air bases and countless no-fly zones all across the country — which also impacts private aviation. That's why most of Drone Explorer's videos are far from the capital, focusing especially on Korea's interior in the Chungcheong and Jeolla provinces, where he can avoid restricted airspace and avoid things sensitive to national security.

"On the one hand, I think restrictions are too tight in Korea. In sensitive areas, you get calls from the police and the military all the time even if you have preauthorization; you practically can’t fly in such places," he said. "But on the other hand, I’ve seen many people being careless. A drone spinning its propellers in the air can be a dangerous object in the wrong hands, so I think smaller drones should also require a demonstration of flying skills, rather than the current internet-based exam."

He added that for all the enjoyment he gets out of flying his drone, it builds up a lot of work for later, when he has to actually edit the footage into uploadable videos.

"Exploration is much more enjoyable, but video production has its own fun," he said. "When flying, I sometimes miss interesting details because I’m concentrating on flying and maneuvering; such details are found when I review my videos for editing."

Visit youtube.com/@droneexplorer to see all of Drone Explorer's videos.

Ron Bandun is an urban explorer. He has been visiting forgotten, abandoned and forbidden spaces in Korea since 2005, documenting changes and conflicts in the urban environment.