Drones beta · DJI
Owners fly it hard, over water, rock and open country, and the accounts here are mostly about what happened when it went down: some survived, some did not.
Owners are divided on how it takes a crash. On the good side, one owner hit a boulder while in ActiveTrack, dropped into a rocky riverbed, and kept flying on the same props for many more hours afterward.
The same theme is split the other way too. One owner lost the drone entirely to a mistake and moved down to a smaller, cheaper model to rebuild confidence, and another had it snatched out of the air by a large bird and wrecked in the jungle.
Pick up to three. You get a page with just those, side by side, on the subjects owners raised.
Once the novelty passes, life with this drone is mostly about where and how you fly it. The owners here take it over rivers, along rock faces, and into places with birds and wasps, and they use the automated tracking modes in terrain that can catch it out. One owner noted the drone hit a house-sized boulder while ActiveTrack was running and could not explain how.
The adjustment owners describe is to their own risk tolerance. One long-time pilot, flying since well before GPS made drones dependable, put his first one in the water after more than a decade and treated it as something you shake off and decide what to do next. Another treated a lost drone as a lesson and stepped down to a smaller model before coming back to this class.
On the crash question the accounts point both ways. One drone took a boulder strike and a fall into a riverbed and flew on for another stretch of hours without even a prop change. Others were finished by a dunking, a bird attack, or a pilot mistake, and in those cases the owners did not report a repair; they wrote the drone off or replaced it.
Beyond crashes, the long-term record here is thin. Only a handful of the owners we read raised durability at all, and every one of them was talking about an impact or a loss rather than ordinary wear. We have nothing yet on how batteries, gimbals, motors or the controller hold up over years of normal flying, so treat this page as a report on crash survival, not on reliability as a whole.
Nothing with a clear majority yet. Owners who raised these subjects were split, or too few to judge.
Nothing has a clear majority against it yet. Counted from the owners who raised each subject, not from everyone. A subject is judged once at least 4 owners raise it.
The same owner, asked again at each point. Fills in as owners answer.
More in drones: DJI FPV, DJI Mini 4, DJI Avata 2.
Public discussions we read and summarised in our own words. Nothing here was submitted to Still Kicks.
Counted from public accounts by people who said they own it, and summarised by Still Kicks in its own words. Not a manufacturer claim, a lab test or an estimate.
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