About remotely operated flying devices.

Nothing about this is really easy to follow from outset. If you get baited into looking into these things, there are a wide variety appearing on the market appearing almost weekly and it’s hard to figure out what the deal is with these.

• Why are some so cheap?
• Some have goggles
• Some seem like flying batteries.
• Enterprise drone stuff is really expensive.

From what I’ve managed to absorb from countless hours of searching, reading, watching and assessing is distilled as follows:

For mere mortal humans, remote “Flying Things” breaks down into three major categories:

1. Toys. Things for children to lose in a tree.
   • Small, tend to be stopped by a strand of hair in a motor.
   • Some are difficult to fly and some can do limited tricks.
   • sub $100 usually.
   • some have video transmission to a phone enabled app
   • Proprietary parts/software, closed eco-system.
   • bad battery life, hard to find replacements.
   • single source parts if you find them.
2. Camera and application specific drones. (DJI, Flyability, FreeFly?)
   • Devices optimized for their payloads.
     • Gimbled cameras
     • Lidar
     • Survey
     • crop spraying
   • Flight is often managed and straight/level is the default mode.
   • Few manufacturers of quality aircraft.
   • Often flown line-of-sight and many have video image transmission
   • Proprietary parts/software, closed eco-system.
     • Expensive batteries
     • single source parts
3. Quad/multi-rotor aircraft
   • Devices are optimized for their flight characteristics and payload requirements.
   • Difficult to fly, few flight modes, generally need constant inputs to sustain flight.
   • Flown using video transmission, First-Person-View (FPV).
   • aircraft frames are inexpensive.
   • Often generic parts that are transferable/portable between models.
   • insanely maneuverable.

Most “Flying Things” will fall into only one of these categories with few overlapping the other, with some exceptions.

DJI – FPV. This is a recent drone offering from DJI that begins to build a bridge between managed flight and intricacies of flying a Quad/multi-rotor in First-Person-View. What it purports to bring is a stepped approach to flying a “manual” quad/multi-rotor by blending the DJI flight controllers with the ability to peel back levels of protection completely, putting the pilot in full un-meddled control of the drone.

The quad/multi-rotor purists seem to abhor this concept, largely because I think they’re miffed right-off they had to learn to fly First-Person-View “the hard way”, resulting in probably much more carnage and cost. The fact this “flying thing” exists at all speaks to the pilot skill gap between the flat-turning camera/application specific drone and their manual quads. More on my observations of the quad/multi-rotor purists in a future post.

Sadly, the combination of an inexpensive camera drone with a set of goggles doesn’t seem to exist, there are plenty of app-based First-Person-View screen based, but fully immersive is heavily split to the quad/multi-rotor category.

Step back to what you want this for. Likely if you are just getting into this, a sub-250g camera drone with managed flight is likely the responsible choice for the unlicensed pilot.