For reference, I took off from and landed in the clearing directly below. Even just flying straight up and straight down on a nearly windless day my
Mini 3 Pro drifted a bit — it came down about six feet from the takeoff point. Or it would have if I hadn't corrected while (slowly and carefully) descending. If I'd been relying on RTH to land it would likely have hit a tree or landed in a tangle of fallen branches.
First, when a drone is in the air, there should always be an attentive pilot, ready to take active control if it's getting into trouble. That should go without saying.
However, it's no more negligent/lazy/whatever to use the RTH automation regularly to end a flight and return than to use the cruise control feature supported on some DJI models. RTH, like cruise control, or dare I say altitude hold, are simply
tools.
Those that are critical or dismissive of using RTH as a regular part of flying, in particular based in the idea that features that make flying easier and more convenient are "not flying", need to take a deeper look at how much automation is in play with a DJI drone in N/S modes, while they are "manually" "flying" it.
We all rely at every moment on position and altitude hold. We expect when we center the sticks that the drone will brake and stop, and then stay in place. On it's own.
We also rely on pointing the drone in some direction, holding pitch forward, and the drone following the heading we have set and following a straight course.
This is what the RTH dissenters in this, and other threads about RTH seem to forget – there is much more automation in play and the drone doing the flying for ordinary flight than the incremental addition of automation that occurs with RTH. All RTH does is add automation of "go there, that fast".
Flying home is easy. Holding position and altitude are not. Holding a heading and staying on a course are also very challenging when
you have to do it.
I've relied on RTH plus Precision Landing to fly from very small areas – 10'x10' deck for example. Why not? I rely on it to brake by itself too.
To really fly your drone, you've got to fly something that supports full manual mode, where you have to hold position, altitude, brake with counter-pitch/roll, etc.
If you never have, you'll learn just how little flying skill you actually have when it comes to the brains of the drone doing so much of the actual flying, while you simply tell it what direction to go and how fast, not having any real control over pitch, roll, and throttle.
And this is exactly why Mr. Nooby Noob can buy a
Mini 2 and be up in the air immediately flying successfully. Little skill is required to fly a DJI drone in N/S modes. Little skill is required to command, "go that way, that fast".
If actually flying the aircraft, as in manual mode, was all there was, I suspect many here, would not be.
This isn't to say that many pilots here that have been flying for years haven't developed important skills, some of them difficult to achieve, in operating a modern drone. It's just that the actual skills needed to do the raw flying are pretty much unnecessary because of the very high degree of automation in modern drones just taking care of the basic flying, so we don't have to.
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