Tag: Mel

San Fabian Public Beach

Tinker Bell‘s next flight was to be on San Fabian Public Beach. It was really yet another test flight, since my personal belief is that a drone only really comes into its own when exploring three-dimensional objects, yet a beach is about as two-dimensional as it gets….

Nevertheless, the mountains around Baguio provided a great backdrop, and the drone rising up over the beach gives a sense of scale, and an idea why I like Philippine beaches so much: Their scale, and the fact that they are not all sold out to resort hotels. I am vastly opposed to mass-tourism, and will never understand while people travel half-way around the planet to be in a place that is deliberately isolated from the local culture, to be with people from their own country, and eat and drink the same foodstuff as at home…

As you can see, I still used the iPad as a controller for this flight, and it’s limited range limited what I could do with Tinker Bell on this occasion. The movie was edited on iMovie on my iPad.

The flight also quite undeniably shows another danger of drone flights. Tinker Bell shows the increasingly desperate state of my cranial hair in a much more blunt and brutal way than any selfie ever could…

Tinker Bell’s First Flight ― The Sunken Garden in Quezon City, Metro Manila, Philippines

After lengthy debate, and investigating a lot of potential sites, we finally decided on the Sunken Garden in Quezon City as the site for the first flight.  While it was unlikely to provide the most stunning of visuals, our thought was that Tinker Bell would be easy to retrieve if she crashed, and that there was relatively limited prospect of causing serious damage in case of pilot error.

The flight was successful, but we instantly learned the first lesson:  Do not take off if there is an overhead obstruction, as otherwise the drone will struggle to return to the landing site ― as it is programmed to do ― if it loses connection to the controlling device.

This flight predates the purchase of my remote control, so I used the DJI GO 4 App on my iPad to control Tinker Bell.  The controls worked fine, but it was also instantly clear that the range of the iPad of about 50 m was not even remotely adequate for my intended purposes, and a remote control was purchased shortly thereafter…

We used the Hover app to check whether flying a drone in the Sunken Garden was allowed.  I very much liked the functionality of the Hover app, but about half a year later found out that its knowledge of No-Fly Zones is patchy at best, and so I now use SkyVector to determine whether or not I can legally fly Tinker Bell in a given area.

Edited on iMovie on my iPad.