As just posted on Drone discussion I now have my Mavic 2 Pro and its all charged and updated & ready to fly. I have just looked at the UAV Forecast app and the headline says ‘Not Good To Fly’. Looking at the forecast page its all green except for 81% cloud cover, its showing 14 visible sats, 11mph wind gusting to 20mph and a temperature of 8c. Would cloud cover affect flight, especially as I am currently using beginner mode and the cloud base looks well over 1000 ft (based on looking at commercial airliners taking off and comparing that to the data shown in Flight Radar).
Forecasts, imo, are generally pretty rubbish. I can’t find one atm that’s suggesting anything below 16mph, gusting 29mph, where I am … but the local airport (500m away!) ACTUAL is only 9mph. I know which I prefer to believe.
Learning to interpret the information is key - so, from the rather anti-social forecast for here, I definitely would expect the winds to increase quite rapidly with height. So I wouldn’t hesitate to fly, based on the actual 9mph, but I would keep an eye on things as I increased height.
The Go4 app gives you a warning for wind, based on how much it needs to fly into it to stay in position, etc., but when this first triggers it’s well within limits for the MP. As a beginner, though, if/when you get that warning, just come back down a bit for it to clear and not keep triggering and you should be fine.
You’re near Newcastle Airport, I see … so actual (10:50am) wind, and recent history, looks pretty OK.
Cloud cover doesn’t affect flight. Go into the settings menu and change the ‘value’ of the cloud cover you are happy to fly in.
If you are happy with 100% cloud cover, change the ‘value’ to that and ‘bingo’, good to fly.
Simarly in settings, set your wind height and maximum wind settings, precipitation level (rain) and sat numbers etc.
I recall one person saying that he got a constant message that it was too windy to fly, yet there wasn’t a breath of wind…turns out he had the wind height at 5000 feet instead of 500.
Try an app called Weather Radar (the free version) its very accurate and shows among other things, a radar view of approaching rain.
I use the UAV forecast app as well and was getting ‘Not good to Fly’ due to the wind gusts value. If you’re happy with the gust risk, go into ‘Settings’ - ‘Threshold Settings’ and turn off ‘Include Gusts’.
I’m hoping to get the advice of the more experienced members for how to optimise the settings within the UAV Forecast app to make sure that flight opportunities aren’t missed.
I’m frequently getting the “Not Good To Fly” notification within the App and would appreciate any advice for the thresholds of the settings. In no way am I wanting to reduce anything to get around this app’s advice, if that were the case I may as well not use it, however I’m wondering if I’ve set the parameters too conservatively.
The stats that show up in some form of red the most are the wind and wind gusts, both set to display the speed at 400ft with the limit at 22mph. Wind direction and Sats locked are the others that most frequently show red. I assume that the direction is linked to the speeds but the stats locked is set to a minimum of 12 but I’ve no clue if this is too high or even how many are the minimum required.
