Experience and reflections on my first flight experience.

[lakeflyer]

Made my maiden flight today, a calm partly cloudy, mild breeze day at a 10 acre open vacant grassy plot of land. I studied walkthough startup and quickcheck videos and ran through the process a few times at my home before heading to the field, so I was prepared. -Preparation is key to making your first flight easy. I used the "Precision Auto Takeoff" so that the drone took an image of my location, and set the drone to return to location. Flying around within close VLOS came very easy. Its when the drone gets further out of sight at high altitude that things begin to get scary. I recovered and landed then dedicated the next battery to Flying by Map. Aclimating myself to switching between map view, camera view and VLOS. I practiced systematically reading the drone distance, heading, altitude & speed while in Map View to navigate to a location, then identify an object of interest, take a picture, shoot a video, then return to map view to orient the drone twoards home. ****The scariest moment was the first time I pushed the drone out to the edge of VLOS -and hit "Return to Home" and the drone took off up into the sky to hit 100 meters -pushing it further from my view- that moment was scary but it taught me the value of knowing how to fly by Map. So now I am pre-plotting every flight in Google maps studying my flight path and flight locations so nothing is left to chance. Initially going into this I thought it was going to be easy to fly BVOLS, now I see thats not the case, and I doubt I'll be doing that anytime soon. And if I can plan my locations well enough, BVLOS might not be neccessary anyhow. So that was Day 1!!

 

[Thomas B]

I like your approach! Incrental learning is a necessity with these complex birds. My approach also. I hope in 6 months I can digest all the info.

 

[BD0G]

Sounds like you had a great day of training!
Always position the Mavic pointed away from yourself upon launch and check overhead for tree's and structures.

Reason to point away is when you push the right stick forward to fly if the Mavic is pointed towards you on launch you may get the Mavic flying right at you instead of away from you.

 

[BobinPitt]

Trees

 

[Mossiback]

Yea! You didn't crash! You sound like the careful type. Set your RTH height for the area so it won't waste time and energy going up where the winds may be too strong to return. You may also want to hold off on the BVLOS stuff until you fully trust yourself and your Mavics abilities. Of course you should not do it anyway (but most of us have/do) but you have to trust in yourself and technology to get it back.

 

[lakeflyer]

Set your RTH height for the area so it won't waste time and energy going up where the winds may be too strong to return. You may also want to hold off on the BVLOS stuff until you fully trust yourself and your Mavics abilities. Of course you should not do it anyway (but most of us have/do) but you have to trust in yourself and technology to get it back.

Very good point. I bought the drone primarily to shoot images and video of Lake Norman where I live. There are lots of shots of homes along the lake and boating activity that require a 500-1000 meter flight to reach, the flight is over the lake and doesnt require 100 meters altitude for RTH flight. In those situations one could economize the RTH setting at say 30 Ft. Another thing about flying across lakes is the benefit of good signal strength. There wont be obstructions or strong radio traffic going on over the lake. I'll start small with flights out over the lake to 100 meters and practice each time pushing the envelope a little further.

 

[BD0G]

Getterback. .