How Not to Fly a Drone for the First Time

How was it?

Quite frankly, it was a bit terrifying. I haven't been less prepared for something so consequential in my life before -- except maybe the SAT, but at least with that I had some modicum of antecedent knowledge.

Let me summarize a bit of general information before I really delve into the anxiety invoking flight I perpetrated; I've had this drone for a time, couple weeks, it's a Phantom 3 Advanced. It hasn't left the case almost at all prior to the flight. I had no real intentions to fly the thing but I got indirectly peer pressured into lift off.

I'd done minor delving into YouTube for various tutorials on where to even begin, and this definitely paid off. But this was all too insignificant in retrospect, given the monumental amount of very generic yet important information I unintentionally ignored. You don't know what you don't know, ya know?

Setting Up

Pretty sure I could sum this about two words, what setup?

Jokes aside though, the setup was incredibly minor and my brain hadn't even registered the concept of "preflight". This is without mentioning that the first time I turned the thing on I didn't even look through the five tutorial videos built into the app that were already recommended to me the first time I opened it.

At this point I see if anything were to happen, it's nobody else's fault but my own. Nonetheless, I plugged my phone into the Remote Control, powered up my drone, and this is where I'd like to put "seamlessly lifted off the ground and displayed prodigious aeronautical prowess". Unfortunately I combated the app telling me what includes but is not limited to: "update your shit", "you really should not take this thing off the ground", "you aren't even supposed to fly here", "wow you really have no concept of what you're doing".

So, by now, I've realized this is not a good idea. But, what was supposed to be just my girlfriend and my dad, ended up being my entire family plus two. There was around ten people total that had the expectation that I was capable of doing the bare minimum. Being one to strive to reach expectations, I threw the thing into beginner mode, and hoped that the fact this thing hadn't been updated in two years wasn't too insurmountable an obstacle.

Swiping left to right on the automatic take off, I watched this thing gracefully float into the air and hover about chest height. "Hey it looks like I have at least a semblance of a clue as to what I'm doing, nice!" Ruminating on the one tutorial video I watched that said the drone's orientation determines it's steering, I glanced between my phone and the drone itself to avoid running into any trees or small children.

Not only was the take off giving me anxiety, my complete and utter ineptitude exacerbated the whole debacle. I very slowly moved each stick, figuring out more concretely what the most basic of functions were. It was quite nice, realistically -- I had started to get the hang of it.

Meticulously, or at least as meticulously as someone who doesn't know shit about what they're doing, I glided over relatively close to my dad and my best friend Tim who tagged along. They told me at this point to take a picture of them, and thankfully the UI was friendly enough to show a white, relatively large and circular white button which I could only really assume was for the pictures. Pressing that, it snapped a quick picture of them, and it worked as I had hoped.

Now to wrap this thing up, I flew around, got a couple obligatory pictures of the rest of the familial onlookers. Then it was time to land. Thankfully there was a lovely "land automatically" button on the app. So all I had to do was position the drone over some even grounding and voila, it landed!

All in All

This endeavor was not the worst experience I've had for sure, but having hundreds of dollars of equipment flying through the air with my baboon of a person handling it, I was going through some anxiety -- that's for certain. Overall though, I'd say, don't be an idiot and actually take some preliminary measures. I had an ample amount more work to do until I was ready to take off but at the very least, I didn't maim any children or family members. Step one though I would say is learn what preflight means and make an attempt at it even if it's a bad one. Regardless, it all worked out, but I definitely had a pretty good chance at none of it working out. So if you ever decide to fly a drone, learn from at least one of the myriad mistakes I made throughout this story.

And if you've got any similar experiences, I'd love to hear em, so maybe I won't feel so bad, haha.