Recent content by Ferdi

No matter how many flight you have under your belt, accidents happen. This looks like a great way to address at least one of the major dangers of our beloved birds. I had a bad landing on a boat last year and my Inspire bit me good and proper! Totally my fault. Having a system like this would’ve...

We fly over water a lot too. Have had the Inspire go into a lake due to some failure. Was a mission to retrieve from just 3 meters of water due to cold stormy water. Now I have 2 Getter Back's attached: https://www.amazon.com/GetterBack-Recovery-System-Velcro-Yellow/dp/B00GIYIU8Q This should...

Updated AC from 1.5.00.30 to 1.9.1.10 last night. After a good while I got a very loud beeping from (I'm guessing) the ESCs followed by a fail tone (text file confirmed failure). Replaced 1.9.1.10 on the SD card with 1.8 and got the same loud beeping but with the DDDD tone, so I let it sit for a...

Totally agree with you Steven! A lot of jobs require us to film high speed action such as boats and motorcycles. It should be up to the pilot to decide how fast he/she goes, not DJI. I'm sure they have "a reason" for reducing performance, but for those of us who need the speed, I too would like...

It is looking more and more like John Alan is correct in his guess that it was fogging. It must've been quite bad fogging to cause that kind of softness. We did travel in an air-conditioned vehicle, then hiked to our flight location 5-8 mins walk away. After those 2 flights with the soft footage...

Thanks. The ambient temp was 25 deg Celsius with 61% humidity.

Hi John. Yes, I agree that fogging might've been the culprit. However, I've had fogging before, and it's always given me a soft, glowing look, like the "pro-mist" filters of old. Somehow this genuinely looks like soft focus, but that seems impossible given the build of the camera. The ND filter...

Had a strange and upsetting experience on a shoot yesterday. We flew 2 batteries in location 1. Footage as expected from the X3. Moved 200m up the road to location 2 and flew 2 more batteries. All the footage out of focus (only saw this when I got into edit this morning). Moved 100m to location...

We used MARSH New Zealand as the insurance broker. Insurance is underwritten by QBE Australia. It's Aviation Insurance cause in NZ other insurance companies won't insure a flying asset (last I looked). Costs $2060 per year for hul (that's the Inspire), $1,000,000 public liability (bodily injury...

Nah, we just call her "The Bird":D Every time I take off I announce "Bird Up", so it kinda stuck. :p

I've still got the .DAT from my "falling from the sky" incident. That was in July 2015. Inspire was recovered and DJI repaired without giving any info on what caused the crash. Camera & telemetry worked till the moment it hit the water. This crash was obviously way before the latest round of...

Never found out what caused it. Loaded my flight record into Healthy Drone, but everything seems good. We have insurance, so I'm not too concerned about the actual bird going down, but that it goes down in front of a client and/or cause damage. That is my true concern. With drones you go from...

Prior to the "falling out of the sky" incident I flew like the Inspire would never fall (even though I knew that sooner or later it could). Back then my biggest concern was not crashing it, so as long as I did my part by doing my pre-flight/post-flight checks and I avoided a crash, she'd do her...

I'm with you brother. Since my Inspire dropped into Lake Taupo for no apparent reason (this was before the recent battery induced crashes & DJI repaired under warranty, but refused to give info on what went wrong) I have on average 5 minor heart attacks each time I fly. Every time my video feed...

In New Zealand the regs state that we have to maintain unaided line of sight, so no binocs allowed...