So my Mavic arrived and after sending it up and down in my back garden I decided to take it down to the local recreation ground and give it a bit more air.
I'm a naturally cautious person so I started off in Tripod mode but that was just too slow so I turned that off. I was very concerned about going over 100ft trees and off into the distance. Yesterday I watched a video on YouTube where this guy sent his drone two miles out to sea in very windy conditions to film a cruise liner. I can't see me ever doing that.
What should I be doing with my Mavic to give me more confidence that it isn't going to drop out of the sky?
Personally I found even at the beginning, as a beginner, that beginner mode was actually (as counter intuitive as it may sound) making me more nervous as it gave a false sense of security/safety, and whenever you pushed up and the Mavic stops going, or you push forward and it stops responding to commands, that can be extremely confusing for a beginner since you don't really know for sure what is causing it. So the added false positives or false negatives and the extra layer of uncertainty doesn't help. Plus in beginner mode the sports mode switch is turned off, which means in a pinch it can't help revert to giving you back full control.
As counter intuitive as it may sound I typically only fly in sports mode now, especially during takeoff and landings, and especially when indoors. You may find, as I have, that the glitches in the obstacle avoidance are simply not worth the trouble, especially since it isn't 360 and only forward sensing, giving the pilot again a false sense of security and not to mention at the direct expense of sometimes causing more issues than it helps. For example indoors, many times obstacle avoidance thing will drift or otherwise move the Mavic around and almost caused me to crash into objects many many times due to flying in a close quarter space, in sports mode these annoyances are disabled.
After a while you get used to sports mode, it is more sensitive than normal mode, but if you input small thrusts in the sticks and immediately let it spring back, in tiny increments with practice you will soon find the Mavic to be extremely agile, maneuverable and able to sense tiny commands for movements in sports mode, to the point where it is more than sufficient finesse to navigate indoors, and extremely helpful during outdoor takeoff and landings (manual of course) as you don't have to worry about glitches caused by the OA or having to override the Mavic trying to outsmart you during a critical phase, and things of that nature.
