DJI Mini 3 Pro drone - First flight

It's time to try flying my new DJI Mini 3 Pro drone. If you haven’t read my previous post on what drone I bought and how I set it up, have a look here DJI Mini 3 Pro drone - getting started (onepawinthesand.com). It was my day off and we had checked the weather app and the app for the flying conditions and everything was good to go. But where do we go? Most of the area near me is open and flat, great for a first flight but it's all privately owned so we can't fly there without permission. I wouldn’t even know whom to ask to get permission, so we had to think of somewhere else. It's also the school holidays in England, so there will be more people around and I really wanted to keep away for their safety and so there wasn’t anyone around to laugh if I crashed :)

We decided to head to one of the quieter beaches in the area. We had been a few times over the winter and it had been nice and quiet. We thought we could walk a bit further along the sand away from the village and it would have a good location to launch from. Once we arrived it was quieter than we thought which was great and the beach had nice flat areas, or so we thought.

After walking away from the main shops and restaurants and beyond the main walking paths we found a potential launch area. It was a shelf of larger stones that looked quite flat, away from the water and lose sand, but as soon as we put the drone down we could see how much it was on a slant so had to rethink. We had a look at other areas, tried to flatten areas, and built up others but nothing was quite right it looked like the rotors would hit something before it managed to take off. I knew that it was possible to launch and land from my hand as I had seen videos of people doing it. Even the DJI academy had said it was easy to do, but I didn’t want such a challenge for flight number one. I ended up using the padded carry bag from the ‘fly more’ kit. Not ideal, but the best we could find in the short term. Next time I will bring a launch pad of some sort that is a bit bigger.

Time to switch everything on and see what we could do, the butterflies in my stomach felt about as big as the drone itself. We filmed the first flight to either prove how intuitive it is or to win some money on one of those TV shows if it all went wrong! Thankfully the screen on the controller guided me through the whole process. I used the auto take-off and was talked through what I needed to do before I could explore myself. The control showed me what to press and said a description of what it would do such as “rotate left” or “forward”. It was all very easy and the controls were simple to understand though maybe a bit more sensitive than I was expecting. The slightest movement of the joystick and the drone shot in that direction but the more I used it the better I got at controlling the speed and direction.

I took a few trips flying the drone out and back and practised landing before I got a bit more adventurous. I sent the drone up, way up! We can legally go up to 120m, but wow that is a long way and the drone became a microdot! I think I got to about 90m and chickened out. I then played with some of the cinematic features that are built into the drone. Tap a few buttons and the drone will guide itself in some moves while doing circles or moving in and out. In short, they can make you look good without needing to fly the drone yourself. I’m sure I will be using some of these features quite a lot in the future :)

Towards the end of my flying time, I did try the hand take-off and landing a few times and though it was a bit nerve-wracking, I did do it. Overall I managed the whole 2 hours without crashing before I got hungry and cold and decided to call it a day. I used two of the three batteries during this time, so I am glad that I got the ‘fly more’ kit. I have a few additional extras that I want to invest in before we leave for Barbados such as filters as it will be bright sunshine there… hopefully and maybe something for additional confidence when flying over water but I will update you once I get them. OH hasn’t had his go yet, but we are scouting another location nearby for him and hope to get out again in the next few weeks. Here is some of my favourite footage from my time filming.