Come on – admit it. You’re fascinated with drones, too! I started buying little hobby drones on Amazon years ago and found out I’m not very good at flying them. But I never aspired to be a skilled drone pilot; I wanted to use them for aerial photos and videos and creating promotional material for my business.
If you are shopping under $500, you will find toys that will try your patience and probably get lost. I’ve lost drones all over southeastern Virginia. They are frenetic little things that don’t provide a good platform for the crappy little cameras they come with. They have little stability in the wind, which increases in force at higher altitudes.
So the obvious solution is to spend more money, but on what? The Chinese company DJI dominates the high-end hobby and light commercial market and I was not looking to become any more industrial than that range. When I was pondering making the plunge, the hot item was the DJI Mavic Air.
The DJI Mavic Air
offered features that boggled my neophyte mind like GPS location, gyro stabilization, a gimbaled stabilized camera with amazing resolution, obstacle avoidance and crazy portability with its fold-up design that lets you pack it away in a suitcase or small carrying bag. Downside – we’re in the $1200 dollar market now.
I ordered the “fly more” package that came with three batteries, spare props, a four station charger and a really nice little soft-side carrying case along with some other accessories I’ve really never used. After unpacking it, I charged it up, and loaded the phone app that works with (or without) the joystick controller. I took it out in the street by my house and did the automatic takeoff function and was instantly amazed when it rose to about 5 feet and just sat there – steady as a rock. With the cheap toys at this point I would be madly correcting all axes, just trying to keep it in one spot. Not with the Mavic Air, though. I could have walked away and let it just sit there hovering. After my first flight, I realized I had found exactly what I was looking for. It made me look like I knew what I was doing.
It has a beginner mode that limits altitude, distance and speed, so I felt confident handing the controller to my four-year old great grandson and turned him loose with it. He quickly got the hang of it and was flying around the property with little fear on my part that some disaster would happen.
What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
The one and only crash was with me at the stick and it was entirely my fault. I was flying at a relative’s house navigating a wooded grove when I accidentally hit the Return To Home button. I hadn’t gotten that far in the owner’s manual yet so I was shocked when it did a startlingly fast climb into the overhead branches and came crashing down with a broken rotor arm. It turns out that RTH makes it fly rapidly to 30 feet and fly back to the takeoff point. Being a DIY kind of guy, I found a replacement arm on Amazon, then I watched the YouTube about how to replace it. Turns out this thing is what we used to call a blivit – that’s 10 lbs. of s**t in a five pound bag. this thing is so crammed to the gills with circuitry that I quickly decided to let the experts deal with it. I sent it off to DJI who returned it pretty quickly and, for a reasonable fee, renewed my accident coverage. After educating myself on RTH I found it is an amazing function. It can bring my little baby back to me and land with amazing precision from the place it took off
Not having any experience with other high end drones, I can’t do a comparative analysis, but functionally the Mavic Air meets all of my needs, but, unfortunately it has reached (planned, I’m sure) obsolescence.
The downside
More often than not, when you begin a new flight session, the interface tells you to calibrate the compass. This seems to happen more often as the machine ages. The calibration procedure requires you to do a “dance” with the drone that really entertains onlookers. It only takes a minute or two, but if you’re in a hurry to capture some event, it’s really irritating.
The Killer Flaw
The batteries are going to cause this product to become useless. The batteries that are provided have great capacity and will keep the bird aloft for 15-20 minutes. They charge fairly quickly and they contain internal processors that keep track of remaining capacity, and number of charge cycles among other things. They also keep track of how long it has been sitting fully charged and automatically discharge the battery to around 60% after a period of time. At that point, you have a choice of flying with a partially discharge battery or putting the battery back in the charger and delaying your flight. I’m and occasional flyer, so almost anytime I want to do a spur of the moment flight, I’m faced with problem. This happens whether the batteries are packed away in the carrying case or sitting in the charger. I’m sure this function is meant to extend overall battery life, but in spite of this these batteries have an abysmally short life. Over time, the batteries begin to swell and finally pop the case open, rendering them useless. I checked the number of charge cycles and my collection of batteries is sitting around 45 cycles. Absurd! My cell phone is Lithium Ion or something similar and it has been discharged and recharged daily for years with no significant decrease in performance. DJI warns against exposing the batteries to high temperatures, and I do make an effort to keep them in the shade in summer. But I have a bevy of Dewalt Lithium Ion powered tools that are constantly exposed to extremes of temperature and none have ever failed.
Buy new batteries, right? Not bloody likely
DJI stopped making them and there is no aftermarket replacement, so the community is scrambling to find the remaining stock on the interweb. I found two “refurb” units for $99 apiece in California. When they arrived, one was DOA, but the vendor quickly replaced it. So I’m back in business for now, but the handwriting is on the wall – this little gem will end up on the shelf in the near future.
Buy a new drone, right? Not bloody likely
Am I really going to invest $1200 in the Air 3 only to have its batteries fail in a few years of casual flying? I don’t think so. I’ll continue the search for new old stock batteries and fly as long as I can. Mavic Air owners are going to have to face the fact that, at some point, their beautiful, sophisticated machine is going to become a useless brick.
Here’s a couple of videos from my channel Drone Fun