Air from an engineering POV

[Skewif]

My first drone and I love it! Only had it for 4 days, 9 batts indoors + 6 outdoors. For what I want it's amazing. So far I'm impressed with everything but a couple of things have surprised me.

1.. the weight. It's heavy. Was expecting a lightweight chassis with a huge and heavy battery, but not so. Batt 140g, bird 300g. It seems very well built and sturdy but why so solid? There are no holes, aero design is full of holes... in everything. It reduces weight with little reduction in strength. Less weight = more flight. Better to make it light and flexible so resistant to breaking than stiff, heavy and expensive to crash.

2.. The power it needs at idle. I've not timed this but it seems to use 20% of the batt just to run the electronics during the expected max flight time while just sitting on my coffee table. Now I know it's doing a heck of a lot of processing what with all those cameras etc. Just seems astonishing it needs a cooling fan running at max when not even moving.

Love what DJI are doing, just can't wait for a light weight, highly efficient version to come out with a way longer flight time.

Soon come I'm sure.

 

[microlinux]

Edit: I just realized this was an Air thread, but the concepts are the same.

There isn't really much to a Mavic. I'm not sure where you would cut out material that wouldn't increase drag. I'm no aerospace engineer, but I can imagine the concepts of shaving weight on an airplane are not directly compatible with a consumer drone that you can expect to take some abuse.

You can see a tear down here:

As far as the electronics, they need what they need. Technology tends to become more power efficient over time.