I've been flying my first real drone, an Autel X-Star Premium, for about 3 months now, and feeling pretty cocky about how well I'm doing. I've been up high a number of times but aside from the cool pictures, flying high hasn't really excited me all that much, and most of my time now has been dedicated to lower-level precision flying.
Yesterday evening I had just enough time to get a quick flight in and make it home before dark. So I grabbed my drone and headed for the field. I live on 50 acres of my own land, backed up against thousands of acres of government forest land, with a big field that I take off and land from.
I was having a grand ol' time, flying figure 8's around the trees and then ascending to about 250' and making a diving decent back to where I'm controlling from. But this evening the background of the darkening sky blended in too well with some Pine trees and I ended up catching the very top of the tallest one. I heard myself yell "No!" about the same time I saw an explosion of Pine needles, and suddenly the drone was gone.
I drove my Jeep over to where I'd seen it disappear and found it about 75' up a tall tree. Had it not been for the drones red lights flashing I would never have seen it. Long frantic story short, I found a tree climber in the area that (for the cost of $100.00) climbed up and retrieved my drone.
Surprisingly, no damage to anything. I am truely impressed at the durability of these things. And I'll be forever thankful for my new-found tree climbing buddy, who’s number I hope to never need again.
Yesterday evening I had just enough time to get a quick flight in and make it home before dark. So I grabbed my drone and headed for the field. I live on 50 acres of my own land, backed up against thousands of acres of government forest land, with a big field that I take off and land from.
I was having a grand ol' time, flying figure 8's around the trees and then ascending to about 250' and making a diving decent back to where I'm controlling from. But this evening the background of the darkening sky blended in too well with some Pine trees and I ended up catching the very top of the tallest one. I heard myself yell "No!" about the same time I saw an explosion of Pine needles, and suddenly the drone was gone.
I drove my Jeep over to where I'd seen it disappear and found it about 75' up a tall tree. Had it not been for the drones red lights flashing I would never have seen it. Long frantic story short, I found a tree climber in the area that (for the cost of $100.00) climbed up and retrieved my drone.
Surprisingly, no damage to anything. I am truely impressed at the durability of these things. And I'll be forever thankful for my new-found tree climbing buddy, who’s number I hope to never need again.
