I notice I’m not the only one a little nervous about their maiden flight. But yesterday I took to the skies of Selsey from the beach at low tide at abut 8.30 pm. Most of the bank holiday crowd had disappeared leaving me alone on a huge expanse of sandy beach (yes there is sand at Selsey at low tide) with just a couple of fisherman and dog walkers to share it with.
All nerves soon faded as I flopped my bright orange ‘helipad’ onto the beach and then eagerly launched my new Mavic Mini for its first serious flight.
Wow!!
I love this machine. What an incredible piece of engineering!
I didn’t do anything particularly special - just getting the hang of a few things. But an hour later and two batteries spent, I packed up and ventured home to eagerly view what must have been fairly amateurish video footage!
Well it is amateurish - after all it’s my first flight! But holy-shmoly - how steady is the camera!!
This baby is just awesome - can’t wait to read the manual (which I couldn’t do at the beach cos no decent phone signal) - to find Out how to use some of its other features!!
So I shall attach - Selsey Beach at Sunset. Video will come later when I’m a bit better at it
Lovely pic and cannot wait to see the video, I use the mini and I love it , I know it has its limits but so does my ability to fly and I’m learning so much from it and loving it and by the sounds of it so are you, just always check on transmitting is set to auto as mine defaults to manual a lot, keep up the good work
Great! You’re airborne! I don’t know how Selsey was but if it was anything like Hayling yrsterday it would have beem impossible to move during peak hours. Tides are good for mid-evening flights this week and the wind is loking good too,
One thing that affects all drones and the Mini more than most is the wind speed. If you know all thjis I apologise but it has been the cause of several losses.
A wind at sea level can be a lot stronger with height. This is a flight I tried last Sunday where ground speed was averaging 2 metres per second at ground level but 9.2 m/s around 100m altitude - and these were average speeds.
If you find that your Mini is struggling against the wind the solution is simple, come down lower where it’s less windy!
The data is from a program called Airdata which a lot of us use for recording and analysing flights. There’s a free version which is good for 100 flights a year and paid versions that add features and allow more records. The data can be uploaded automatically after each flight. Try it!
