A Few Quadcopter Flying Tips

Today’s Post by Mark Toal with Joe Farace

Flying a quadcopter may seem easy but as Señor Wences once famously said “Is easy for you, is difficult for me.” Here are a few tips and recommended accessories to help with your first flights:

• Find a large field that doesn’t have too many trees. It’s easy to get your Quadcopter tangled on tree branches and you don’t want to have to rescue it from a kite (and quadcopter) eating tree. Similarly avoid hard paved areas and buildings. If you crash, you want it to be as soft as possible. Buy a set of rotor guards for when you do tangle with a tree
• Get an extra battery or two. Battery life on smaller, less expensive quadcopters can be as short as 10 minutes.When the battery is low and you have a light camera on board the quadcopter will stop rising and slowly start to come down. If you have a heavier camera on board, flight time is reduced and it comes down much faster.
• Just as with a real aircraft use a pre-flight checklist before taking off for the wild blue yonder. There are many checklists available on the Web, some designed just for your quadcopter. MultiRoterUSA has one you can download to get started.
• Repeat after me: You will crash your quadcopter. You will crash your quadcopter. Many quadcopters have a built in GPS and easy-to-use controls and may seem deceptively easy to fly but even a slight breeze can make a quadcopter drift so you have to constantly correct its flight direction. After some experience in an open field, this isn’t difficult to master and Joe found (below) when flying his second quadcopter, a UDI U818A-1 Discovery, after repeatedly crashing his first.
  

Be prepared to get addicted. It’s that much fun.