Hi from sunny Derbyshire!
An idle musing…when returning the drone from relatively nearby flight and as I have LoS I tend to fly backwards to me rather than yaw and fly forwards. Whats the thoughts on relative battery usage/efficiency?
Whichever your attitude … time is your enemy, since they don’t use much different in any attitude. The vast majority of the power is used just to stay in the air.
Yes good point, hadn’t thought about it from that point of view.
Just trying to be as efficient with my three batteries (thanks Fly-More pack!) as possible. Perhaps I need to be less of a skin-flint and buy more 
As a predominately coastal flyer, the direction of the wind determines the most efficiency battery wise for me.
I’ll only fly backwards when capturing a vessel. I not a fan of it in general flight and I’d doubt it would save on battery life.
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Downwards tends to be the most battery efficient …
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No other than certain filming shots I don’t either as a general rule, have enough of a challenge flying forwards 
. Appreciate your thoughts thanks.
Drone direction is probably less important than height. The lower the less wind usually.
Downwind,but when you return it’s going to be upwind 
Indisputable fact that
However, the essence of my original question seems to have been lost…not that the question was THAT interesting in the first place .
I’ll try and clarify…
You fly from your start point A to your destination point B. At that point the drone is facing away from you.
In order to bring it back you can either rotate the drone to face your start point A and fly to it, or, fly backwards to start point A. So the comparison is the extra energy used to rotate the drone versus any differential in backwards versus forwards flight.
Or to put it another way, flying backwards saves the energy used in rotating the drone unless the act of backwards flight uses more energy than forward flight over the same distance!
I may fly to objects many times in one filming session so potentially can save energy and continue flying/filming for longer! i’m all about efficiency.
Though, as I said before, maybe I should just suck it up and buy more batteries .
It’ll depend on the shape and design of drone.
For a standard mini/mavic brick shape they dont really produce much lift, especially at slow speeds so forward/backward isnt going to change much.
Sideways has a bigger cross section, hence more drag so should use somewhat more power per given speed.
However thats in theory - in reality im not convinced you’d be able to measure a real world difference.
But wind is going to play a far far bigger role.
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I find with my m3p that when circulating in 360 mode and filming a subject the battery will decrease quickly.
Yes agreed 
That matches my experience as well
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the most efficient way to come back from height, is to descend slowly as you fly forwards ,of course this will depend on your height above the home point as you start your return ,rather like an aircraft coming in to land on a glide slope,
but really in real world conditions, the difference in methods would not really be noticeable ,as you know a drones actual structure and shape has very little contribution to actual lift its the rotating wings (props) that do that regardless of its direction forwards or backwards