If you’re flying as a hobby, you don’t need any special training or certification before taking a drone into the air. But that doesn’t mean you should take your new quadcopter out of the box and start flying it immediately. Instead, learn how to use it safely and effectively to get the best images and video, without sacrificing the safety of yourself and others.
Learn Your Drone
Chances are you did some research before spending a few hundred dollars (or more) on a quadcopter. But if you’re not sure about what your drone can do, it’s time to figure it out.
The latest top-end models are packed with helpful safety features, but you need to understand what they do, and how they work to take advantage of them. Obstacle avoidance is a big one—a lot of drones have it, but it doesn’t always work the same way. Is it always on in your model? Will it automatically navigate around obstacles, or will it simply freeze in place when it detects something blocking its path? Are the sensors on the front only, or on multiple sides of the aircraft?
You should also understand how the automated return-to-home function works. Pretty much every drone with GPS will fly back to its takeoff point in the event the control signal is lost, or on demand. You can typically set an altitude for the home flight. This is especially critical if you are flying in an area with trees or other low-altitude obstacles—you’ll want to make sure the drone is set to ascend to a safe height before the automated return.
You should be intimately familiar with the location of the return-to-home command, whether it be a physical button on your drone’s remote control, or an icon in the app that adjusts settings. You should also see if your remote has a Pause button to stop and hover in place with a button press.
And, while it’s a last resort, you should also learn how to cut power to your drone’s engines in the event of an emergency. I’ve seen some models fly away unexpectedly, and I’d rather pick up the pieces of a crashed drone and recover a memory card than to have the aircraft fly away, never to be seen again.
