Spring flying, with dangerous and clandestine rustiness

[Nosebump]

What a beautiful day! The sun was out, and it was warm enough to wear only short sleeves. After charging batteries that had been stored mostly all winter, I put everything together and launched.

What I hadn’t counted on was my extreme rustiness with the controls. I’d flown to a neighbors house and descended down to hover over his rear deck. When I tried to ascend and move forward a little, the drone refused. Why?!

I was putting in the wrong stick inputs, and the sensors were actually saving my bacon! After not flying for months, my natural pilot skills were overpowering my drone skills that were rusty (I’m a professional pilot with over 22,000 hours). I’d made the same mistake when I was new to drone flying, but with practice, overcame that defect. Alas, it had returned.

So the moral of the story is to take a few steps backward and become “current”, before trying anything fancy...same as with a big plane.

Lesson learned!

 

[old man mavic]

@Nosebump great advice its very easy to lose that instant stick control,when you haven't flown for a while,as you say best to treat that first flight, as your first ever,in a quiet large open area and spend the first battery refreshing the old muscle memory it soon comes back
i think in light of the current virus restrictions, there will be many of us,who will not be getting much if any air time in

 

[ToTheSummit]

As a brand new pilot I also found it useful to configure the controls on my MM to my liking. The wife and I like to play video games and the stick controls were all wrong for me when set at default. I found it much more intuitive once I configured them to function similar to how my video game controller works. Still quite a learning curve as a new pilot but it helped a lot, especially when flying from the FPV on the app rather then watching the drone itself.

 

[hiflyer201]

DJI has a pretty good simulator...takes a fairly good graphics card though. I'm not sure if it works with the Mini.
I agree that a lot of fixed wing time doesn't do much good from the outside looking in but it does teach that anything that can go wrong probably will

 

[Dbez1]

@Nosebump
i think in light of the current virus restrictions, there will be many of us,who will not be getting much if any air time in

Hopefully, many can fly from their home, which could increase flight time. ?

 

[Endeavor]

I agree one does get rusty and gun shy over the winter. I am heading out this week to practice. Plus I have new drones to get used to and each one is a bit different.