Produced By Special Effects Company, It Went Viral For A While

You may have on Tuesday seen a video of a quadcopter appearing to hit the winglet of a Southwest 737 and taking the top couple of feet off the winglet.

The reason it wasn't reported here and elsewhere is because the video was faked.

Not to say that it wasn't a good fake. If you watched in real time, you could believe that a quadcopter hit the winglet and took a chunk out of the airplane. There is even very convincing audio of a crying baby in the airplane's cabin.

But then it begins to look odd. For instance, the UAV is too large in perspective compared to the wing of the airplane.

Then, if you look closely, you see that the url on the winglet is not "Southwest.com" ... but rather "Branit.com".

And Southwest had no report of any airplane being hit by a UAV.

Flight Club reports that the domain belongs to a special effects designer named Bruce Branit. He later tweeted "Making something viral is like fishing. Gotta put something good on the hook. But still no guarantee you're going to catch anything."

What he may have caught is a lot of free publicity for his company ... which was probably the point all along. We'll give him another plug.

(Image from Live Leak video via YouTube)

FMI: Video