Flying—and crashing—a $1,300 quadcopter drone

The Dunning-Kruger effect: a bias wherein unskilled persons mistakenly overestimate their ability to accomplish a given task. After buzzing DJI's Phantom 2 Vision+ quadcopter drone around my driveway for about two minutes, I'm pretty sure I was its walking embodiment.

"This is easy!" I said, flying the expensive piece of equipment—on loan from DJI—around in a tight box. "And awesome!" I jammed the left stick forward and the drone rocketed skyward, shooting up to a hundred feet overhead without any apparent effort. Its little LEDs blinked happily at me as I rotated it around its central axis, surveying the neighborhood in stately fashion. As the machine turned, it beamed down 1080p video to my phone, showing me a Google Maps-eye view of myself standing in the driveway below.

I wanted to quickly pull the video off the drone and do a fast front page post—maybe something like, "Flying drones is totally easy even for someone with no experience!"—but the day was windy. The drone wobbled back and forth within about a two-meter box as I brought it back toward the ground. As it drifted toward one of the oak trees in my front yard, I froze up. The stupidity of taking the drone up for its maiden flight in high winds in my crowded front yard suddenly hit me, full force, and in the time it took for me to sort out that and bank away from the tree, I needed to move the right-hand stick backward—no, wait, forward, because I'd yawed it around and its front was toward me—no, wait, crap, which way is—

BZZZZZZTWHAP. In a horrifying time-stretched second that seemed to take about ten million years, I watched the drone strike branches and leaves, the props stop spinning, and the whole $1,299 contraption drop out of the sky like a lead parakeet, smashing into the sidewalk. The battery flew off in one direction and the integrated camera in another. There was a moment of absolute stillness.

"Aw…fudge," I said, mostly.

Backing up a bit

Before we get into what happened next—and how even senior reviews editors should read the manual first—we need to dig into the subject of our review: the drone itself.

DJI's Phantom 2 Vision+ is an updated version of the Phantom 2 Vision. It's a GPS-directed four-rotor quadcopter—more properly, it's a legitimate drone, since it is capable of semi-autonomous flight. In fact, other drones in the Phantom 2 family can operate entirely on preprogrammed waypoints without any direct control (a capability which DJI tells us the Vision+ will gain within a few weeks with a software update).

The selling point of the Vision+ is its built-in camera, mounted on a fully stabilized three-axis gimbal. During flight, the gimbal keeps the camera straight and level even while the drone shifts and banks; the camera can also be panned and tilted from the ground by using the DJI Vision app on an iOS or Android device.

Like its older Phantom 2 and Phantom 2 Vision siblings, the Vision+ uses GPS to figure out its position, altitude, and velocity. When you first turn the quadcopter on, it performs a brief self-test and then starts to listen for GPS satellite signals from the sky. Once it’s locked on to at least a half-dozen of them, it’s ready to fly in its semi-automated GPS mode. Flying in this mode—and though there are other flight modes you can enable, this is definitely what you want to be using—makes the Phantom 2 Vision+ behave like a fly-by-wire aircraft: you tell it to go "forward," and the drone decides what "forward" means and how best to head that way. When hovering without any control input, the drone has a certain cubic volume (about two meters on a side) that it will try to stay within no matter how bad the wind happens to be; in several hours of flight, we rarely encountered a situation where the drone strayed out of its little hover box. When it did, it was because something had screwed up its internal compass calibration.

You fly the drone through a dual-stick controller similar to what you’d use with any other remote-controlled aircraft. With fresh batteries and without obstructions, we found it to have an effective range of about a thousand feet in any direction (including straight up—we’re getting to that). The onboard camera relays its image in real-time over a separate radio channel to a separate transceiver perched on the remote; that transceiver in turn sets up a short-range Wi-Fi network to which you join your smart phone. Once this is done, you can see the camera’s relayed picture in the DJI app. It’s a little Rube Goldberg-y, but in practice it works perfectly—well enough to fly the drone via the camera’s video relay if it goes out of visual range. The app also shows you the drone’s distance, bearing, and altitude, which are all extremely useful for locating the thing in flight. You can control the camera from the ground but only along the tilt axis (though you can tilt the camera using your phone's internal accelerometers, which is neat). If you want to pan, you have to turn the whole drone.

The app eschews standard iOS typefaces and design standards, opting instead for a customized and clunky skin. It doesn't quite impair usability, but it definitely has the look of an application designed by engineers without much thought to how the interface should look.

Still, it's serviceable. The app lets you take stills and record video (both of which are stored locally on the drone’s microSD card—DJI provides owners with a 4GB card, but you can use whatever size you’d like) and adjust some basic image parameters like white balance and exposure. The camera’s max resolution for both still and moving images is 1080p; image quality for stills looks about like your average smart phone, with video quality being a little lower. It definitely doesn’t produce video that looks as good as a GoPro, but it’s perfectly serviceable for flying around and looking at stuff.

Of course, the big draw of the Phantom 2 Vision+ over DJI’s previous Phantom 2 Vision isn’t just the camera—the older model came with a camera, too—but the three-axis stabilized gimbal integrated into the camera. Unlike the drone’s predecessor, the Vision+ keeps the camera steady along all flight axes and produces butter-smooth video. Of course, if you prefer something with higher quality, you could purchase a Phantom 2 body (sans camera) along with a separate stabilized GoPro gimbal, but then you lose out on the end-to-end integration DJI’s system provides: that live video and telemetry relay requires yet more bolt-on parts if you want to do it yourself.

In a lot of ways, the Phantom 2 Vision+ is the opposite of the DIY quadcopter experience. I attended a meeting of a local drone piloting club, and most of the club members had homebuilt quadcopters of various levels of sophistication. A few folks had complex Arduino-based rigs with video relaying, but none of the homebuilt quadcopters had the straight out-of-the-box-just-works sophistication or functionality of the Vision+. The trade-off, of course, is price. You can get a decent DIY quadcopter built and flying for only a few hundred bucks if you’re not terribly choosy about the components. The Phantom 2 Vision+, on the other hand, costs $1,299. That’s the extra price for convenience.

Flying without dying

So what about the aftermath of my flying accident? The good news is that the Phantom 2 Vision+ is built like a tank—most of it, anyway. The impact trashed the expensive integrated camera and stabilized gimbal, but I removed both from the drone’s body and was back flying that afternoon, sans camera and sans bravado. Far less easy was penning the e-mail to Mike Perry of DJI, informing him that I’d broken a very expensive piece of loaner equipment. Fortunately, Mike & the DJI team took the news totally in stride and sent me a replacement, while I shipped the original back for repairs.

I was much, much more cautious with the replacement. And it turns out that flying the Phantom 2 Vision+ is easy—it just requires practice, and it’s really best if you have a few hundred meters of open field to do that practicing in.

The hand-held flight controller remote, with video range extender and smart phone clip (with smart phone).

Credit: Lee Hutchinson

The left stick on the remote controls altitude and yaw; up and down make the drone ascend and descend, while left and right cause the drone to turn in that direction. The right stick controls forward and backward motion along the up/down axis and lateral motion along the left/right axis. The fact that the drone is symmetrical meant that for the first few hours of flight, I had to think very carefully about what I wanted to do and how I wanted to do it. Confining motion to one axis at a time and making slow, careful movements let me built up the confidence to do more complicated movements, like turning while moving forward.

Still, the first half-dozen sessions were filled with anxiety: if the drone got turned around (which reverses your control inputs), I’d have to take five or 10 seconds and think my way through a series of motions to get back where I wanted. I loved zooming the thing around—DJI’s spec sheet lists a maximum speed of 15 meters per second, and while I didn’t measure the drone’s velocity, I can tell you that it definitely can go a lot faster than I can run. But having the drone more than a few feet away would also cause a lot of clenching on my part. I was terrified of damaging a second one. Terror can make one very, very cautious.

In flight, the drone's red LEDs (and its two red-striped arms) face forward. Still, it's easy to get turned around, and keeping a clear picture in your mind of what control does what takes practice.

Credit: Steven Michael

After getting a number of flights under my belt, though, I started to loosen up. I never quite lost that sense of anxiety, especially when the drone would go far enough away that I had to resort to using one of the alternate flight modes to bring it back. But blasting around a big open area at top speed, zipping over water, or hovering at a thousand feet up in the air and watching the rock-steady video image was absolutely exhilarating. The drone is insanely nimble and responds instantly to control inputs. A skilled pilot could easily wring some crazy aerobatics out of it.

The drone’s GPS awareness works with you, as well. If you panic and aren’t sure exactly where your current maneuver will have you end up, you can simply let go of the sticks. The drone will cancel out its momentum and hover in place, sticking within a two meter-ish cube. Short of flying it into something like a building or a power line or a tree, there’s not much you can do in GPS mode to make it crash.

ATTI mode, course lock, home lock, and auto return-to-home

At low altitudes, you can fly the drone by directly watching it and guiding it (though it’s very easy to get mixed up about which end is forward, even with the aid of the drone’s direction-indicating LEDs). But the strength of the remote and the sheer maneuverability and speed of the thing mean that it’s very easy to fly it out of visual range, at which point you have to either fly based on the video relay—which gets spottier as distance increases—or give up and summon it home.

Out of the box, the drone is configured in what DJI called "Phantom mode," which means that some of its more advanced flight capabilities are disabled. If you’re a new user and you want to just fly around, Phantom mode is exactly what you want to use. If you lose the drone, you can turn off the remote, and the drone will enter "go home mode," where it will ascend to 60 feet, fly slowly to the point where it achieved its initial GPS lock when you turned it on, and then gently descend to a landing (if it’s above 60 feet, it will stay at its current altitude).

However, using DJI’s desktop application and a USB cable, you can put the drone into "NAZA mode," named after the DJI NAZA flight controller module that powers the drone. In NAZA mode, the three-way toggle switches on top of the controller gain some interesting abilities.

First, the S1 switch at right becomes a programmable toggle between "GPS mode," which works exactly like the drone’s out-of-the-box default flight mode, and "ATTI mode," where the drone gains maneuverability and loses some of its GPS-powered safeguards. The S1 switch’s bottom position can be configured to either put the drone into its automatic return home mode (so that you can trigger it without having to turn the remote’s power off) or full manual mode.

A word about full manual mode: don’t use it unless you’re a skilled pilot. In full manual, the drone has no safeguards, no auto-leveling, no nothing; it can do some truly nuts maneuvers under the thumbs of a skilled operator, but it can also flip upside down and drop from the sky like a lead parakeet. It’s best to leave S1’s bottom position set to return home mode.

DJI's Phantom desktop application allows you to modify the drone's behavior and lets you enable more advanced flight and navigation modes.

The S2 switch on the left side of the stick also gets new abilities. In the full up position, the drone flies normally. In fact, with S1 and S2 both fully up, the drone’s behavior is indistinguishable from its novice-friendly Phantom mode. However, toggle S2 to the middle position, and the drone enters "course lock" mode.

Course lock mode changes the drone’s perception of forward, backward, left, and right from relative to absolute. In course lock mode, pushing forward on the left stick sends the drone not forward relative to its orientation, but forward relative to the direction it faced when it got its original preflight GPS lock. Same with backward and left and right.

Since you can only pan by yawing the drone, toggling course lock mode lets you fly the drone "forward" while rotating—useful if you want to track a target with the camera during an aerial shot or keep pace with a moving car or other target while flying.

You can also turn on IOC, or "Intelligent Orientation Control," which enables you to use the S2 switch on the remote to activate "course lock" and "home lock" modes.

S2’s bottom position is perhaps the most useful of all—this engages "home lock" mode. Much like course lock, home lock changes what the drone thinks of as forward/backward/left/right, but it does so radially, using the initial GPS lock point as the origin. In home lock mode, "backward" is always toward the home point, and "forward" is always away from it.

Home lock is used when you’re not sure where the hell the drone is, and you want to bring it back, but you don’t want to invoke its fully automatic return mode. Flip S2 all the way down and crank the left stick back toward you, and regardless of the drone’s position or orientation, it’ll begin flying back toward the place where it first took off from. Once it gets back where you can see it, you can flip S2 back up to normal mode and resume your drone adventure or land.

Though functional, the desktop application is an absolute design nightmare of clashing interface elements and terrible organization. On OS X, the application's UI appears to be custom coded to look vaguely like an OS X app without actually using standard OS X interface elements. And visual elements aside, the app's options and tooltips are rife with bad grammar (DJI is a Chinese company, and it's likely that the app's text strings were translated to English by someone who wasn't a native speaker).

Organizationally, the app uses double-nested tab groups in an effort to cluster similar functions and pieces of information together, but it does so badly. The end result is that you often have to click in about a dozen different places in order to find the setting you want to view or modify.

Fortunately, you don't have to use the app terribly often, and nothing about the app impairs the drone's actual ability to fly. The usability issues are only a minor annoyance. However, there is something pretty major that repeatedly got in the way of us soaring off into the wild blue yonder.

The killjoy of battery life

The only truly disappointing thing about the Phantom 2 Vision+ is its battery life. Although the drone comes with a 5200 mAh battery, that juice doesn’t last very long. DJI’s specs claim a flight time of about 25 minutes on a single charge; in our experience, we found we’d typically get between 10 and 15 minutes of flight before we hit the 30 percent mark, and the app began blaring a warning klaxon sound, and the drone began flashing its "LOW VOLTAGE" LED warning signal at us.

The more wind and the more maneuvering, the shorter the flight. The absolute longest we got out of the drone was 21 minutes on a calm day, with most of that time spent gently hovering at low altitude. The shortest flight was right at 10 minutes, with most of that taken up by fast maneuvering.

That big battery on the back is the most limiting thing about the drone—in dozens of flights, we rarely got more than 15 minutes of air time on a single charge.

Credit: Steven Michael

It’s worth noting that at no point did I let the drone dip below about 25 percent. The possibility of running out of power and having the drone fall from the sky was terrifying. If I’d been willing to fly it down to the wire, I could have likely gotten another several minutes out of the battery, but it’s too expensive a device to take chances with.

If you want to spend a few hours flying, you’ll need multiple battery packs. Each one costs $159 (though you can buy a drone that comes with a second battery for $1,369—that’s the only way to pay less than $159 for a battery).

Where eagles dare—and where they don’t

With a size of bigger than the average bird and a max flight ceiling of well over a thousand feet, the Phantom 2 Vision+ can pose a very real danger to aircraft of all sizes. With that in mind, DJI includes airspace restrictions in the Phantom’s firmware.

If the drone’s GPS detects that it’s within certain preset limits (starting at about five miles) of an area of controlled airspace, it begins to limit its flight ceiling, with the limit decreasing the closer one gets to an airport. Within about a mile and a half of an airport, the drone will refuse to fly altogether.

Controlled airspace flight limitations, from DJI's desktop application.

These limits are programmable, but you have to take the drone out of Phantom mode to do it. Out of the box, it won’t fly at all near an airport. We didn’t take the drone anywhere near any of Houston’s airports to test its flight limitations, but DJI’s forums are full of posts discussing them, so they definitely work.

Post-flight

Part of the reason why this review has taken so long to write is that flying the thing is just so fun. I don’t want my time with the drone to be over, and I can’t quite justify the $1,299 purchase price. In spite of the short battery life, there’s something amazing about sailing the little drone up to 500 feet and cruising around—it’s the closes thing I’ll ever get to having my own jetpack, I suppose, and the liquid-smooth video image produced by the gimbal-mounted camera is just amazing.

In fact, the post-flight is half the fun. You fly for 15 minutes, then land, get home, and pull the microSD card out and then spend another 15 minutes reliving the flight through the video.

Pretty much anywhere I took the Phantom 2 Vision+, I got comments. No one freaked out and attacked me, fortunately. Everyone who came up to me was fascinated by the drone and boggled by the video relay. Kids, especially, were gob-smacked by the drone—the most frequent comment from the under-12 set was "WHOOOOOOOOAAAAAAA," followed by "CAN I TRY?!" I didn’t let anyone else fly it, but it was easy to unclip my phone from the remote and let someone else drive the camera.