At some point, everybody who’s flown a drone was a beginner. And beginners are picking up a drone for the first time every single day. Maybe you’ve just got your first. Maybe it’s the DJI Mini 3 Pro featured in these videos from Jeven Dovey and Jake Sloan where they go through thirty of the biggest mistakes drone pilots make – particularly new ones – when it comes to getting into the air for the first time.
Even if you’ve been at it for a little while, there are still mistakes you’re probably making when it comes to flying your drone. In a list this big, it’s almost a certainty and I’m definitely guilty of a couple of them myself. The 30 tips are split up across the two videos from Deven and Jake, so be sure to watch both to make sure you don’t miss anything. You might not even realise you’re doing some of this!
The 30 tips begin in Jeven’s video and while some of them are specific to features of the DJI Mini 3, most if not all of the tips can apply to other drones as well, no matter who makes them or what model of drone they are. I primarily fly an Autel Evo Nano (review here) and an XDynamics Evolve 2 (review coming soon), but a lot of these are things that I’ve found myself forgetting about in the past occasionally. After Jeven’s video’s finished, the tips continue in Jake’s video below.
Many of the tips are pretty obvious, but they’re also things that are easy to look unless you make a conscious effort to stay on top of them. At least until they just become second nature and things you do out of habit – like remembering charge up your batteries and format your memory cards before you head out the door. Oh, and checking a new firmware hasn’t been released overnight that’s going to keep you grounded until you update!
That last one can be extremely frustrating. I went out with the Autel Evo Nano once to find that I had no manual exposure control whatsoever and it was locked to -1EV exposure compensation because that’s what I’d used last time I was out. The cause was the smartphone app automatically updating itself but I hadn’t checked to see if there was a drone update. The new app and the old firmware weren’t fully compatible with each other, stopping me from adjusting my exposure until I updated – which is impossible to fix if you’re in a location that doesn’t get any coverage.
This list is by no means complete. There are far more than 30 mistakes drone owners make, but these are some of the biggest and most obvious once that most of us have probably made at some point! Which of them are you guilty of?
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