The Drone Pilot Chronicles, Part Two

Welcome to The Drone Pilot Chronicles, Part Two.

As you might have read last time, I am bound and determined to learn to fly my new quadcopter drone. I specifically bought it last November to enhance my Last Wanderer of Mars episodes with the addition of some aerial footage every now and then. At the time, I treated the purchase the same way I would the purchase of any other camera.

But this thing isn’t just any other camera. This is a flying camera. And that makes this a challenge.

The Syma X5C-1 Quadcopter Drone

What I have is a Syma X5C-1 quadcopter with a tiny HD camera attached to its belly. After tons of trial and error (admittedly mostly error) the badly converted-from-Chinese Instruction Manual is starting to make some sort of sense. But that’s only after watching a ton of on-line tutorials and as many crash-and-burn test flights. The guys in the tutorials say that this drone is so easy to fly that your grandmother could fly it. They put it into the air and it does exactly what they say it should do. They make it hover. They make it do flips in the air. Hell, they just toss it into the air and start it with the controller before it falls.

But I think somebody needs to send my grandmother over, cause I can’t fly the thing at all.

Determined to become a competent drone pilot, I decided that training in the common backyard of my apartment complex was a bad idea. There’s plenty of open area, but not enough for a speedy little flying thing that doesn’t like to follow commands - or at least it doesn’t like following mine. There are lots of pine trees and two story building for it to crash into, not to mention Beach Bum’s tree beside the house -- Beach Bum being my gray-striped cat. The drone has crashed into that twice, once while Beach Bum was in it. The other time it got tangled in the branches and just hung there with its lights blinking uselessly until I jumped up and pulled it free.

So it became quickly obvious that I needed to find someplace else for test flights. There was a parking lot down the street from my apartment that I first considered. But on closer inspection, it wasn’t any bigger than my backyard, and one of its boundaries is a street. All I’d need was to crash-land the drone on that and have a passing car run over it. So, no good.

Then I remembered Artegon Mall which houses my favorite movie theater. It has a huge parking lot surrounding it like most malls do. And since the only three real draws are Ron Jon’s Surf Shop (no shit, an actual surf shop in Orlando Florida - I bought my long board there last summer since I get a 15 percent discount), a Bass Pro Shop and the Cinemark Theater, most people park in the front lots. The lots on the back side are nearly always empty. Of course they are riddled with scrubby little trees in planters (I often used to skate around those while waiting for a movie to start, something mall security was always getting upset with me about) but it was still worth a look as a potential launch point, so I decided to check it out.

What I found was a piece of serendipity. There is a huge, wide, empty grassy field bordering the back lot. I figured that it couldn’t be more perfect. Crashing on grass, particularly the type of thick grass you find all over central Florida, isn’t really like crashing at all. So after a disappointing movie (The Fifth Wave, a badly done teenybopper Divergent/Hunger Games/Twilight clone) I drove over to the field for a test flight.

I was excited. I took out another camera to document the flight. I walked into that field, set the drone on the thick soft grass, paired it with the controller, took a breath and then took off. Like I said, crashing on the thick turf that covered that field would be like crash landing on piles of foam rubber. Only that’s not where it crashed. It crashed behind me on the asphalt parking lot. Three times. Every time I carried it into the field and sent it up, it flew right out of the field straight into the lot. It was driving me crazy until I looked at the LCD display on the controller and noticed that it said “mode 2”.

Forehead palm.

The Syma controller is pretty much the same as any controller for any model helicopter or quad copter you might buy except for one thing. It has two modes of operation; mode one and mode two. Mode one is default. Mode two reverses some - but not all - of the controls. Since Syma sells its products on a worldwide market, I’m just imagining that the mode two configuration must be standard someplace, like maybe the Middleofnowherevia. Obviously if I had any hope at all of getting this thing in the air and having it stay there, I needed to change modes on the controller. I just didn’t know how. Somewhere in China, a somewhat inept interpreter sitting in front of a computer was laughing his ass off.

Defeated, I slumped over to the Artegon Mall parking lot on the other side of the road and picked up my sad little quad copter which was lying upside down on its propellers with its underside lights blinking mournfully. At least nothing on it had broken. This is a tough little flying machine. The propellers were scuffed from their contact with the asphalt, but nothing was out of alignment or broken. For that at least, I was impressed.

When I got home I discovered, just to ad insult to injury, that the camera hadn’t deployed so there was no video of the failed flights to learn anything from. At first I wanted to panic. I mean, really, without the camera, there wasn’t much point to having the drone in the first place. Fortunately, it was just a loose wire.

Relieved, I turned to the Instruction Manual. Sure enough, there was a procedure for changing modes on the controller. It was simple -- just slide the proper switch to the right while turning the controller on -- but it wasn’t anything I could have figured out standing out there in that field unless I did it by mistake, which is probably how the controller got in mode two in the first place. I put the drone on the floor and raised it halfway to the ceiling. Forward and backward controls worked the way they were supposed to. I landed it and turned it off before I could take out another lamp.

Tomorrow was another day. I’d either return to that field or find another. One way or the other, I was going to master this. I will become a drone pilot. Just not today.

The Future of Wandering

This year, The Last Wanderer of Mars is going to look different.

Not that it’s ever looked bad. Last year I produced 23 episodes of Wanderer. I took viewers skateboarding, surfing and up in the air on a helium balloon. I

Episode 23

them what a high-speed motorcycle ride was like from behind the handlebars. I took them to Walt Disney World for a ride under the sea on the Little Mermaid and on a real underwater adventure at a mysterious island called Egmont Key where we explored a ghost fort both on land and under the

Episode 24

emerald green Atlantic. We went to Epcot to sample the cuisine at the International Food and Wine Festival and to Universal Studios to go face-to-face with a Velociraptor. I showed them what it was like to perform as a psychopath at the world’s biggest Halloween party, Universal’s Halloween Horror Nights. I sampled the hottest hot sauce I could find; gave my viewers tips on

Episode 29

barbecuing, demonstrated how to hard boil an egg and showed them how to effectively peel it. I revived a beloved cult favorite television show from the 1960s using an audio track and some spare

parts and then gave everyone the formula for success: namely, one part Vermouth to two parts Gin.

All in all, it was quite a year. Most of these shows were shot on either a Canon Sure Shot (which sadly fell, irreparably broke and was given last rites at the bottom of a pond), a Nikon 12.0 mega pixel Coolpix, a Pentax 14 mega pixel waterproof WG-1 or the camera on my Iphone 4s. The video I produced was edited using Windows Moviemaker 2.6, which is the version that originally came with Window Vista. Serious videographers are shaking their heads about now. Moviemaker isn’t exactly Final Cuts, and I have to admit it seriously limits what I can do. The program only accepts AVI or WMV formats, so anything I shot on the Iphone had to be converted. And converting mp4 video to AVI results in a noticeable drop in video quality as well as an occasional loss in audio sync. Not only that, but that version of Moviemaker doesn’t produce finished product in wide screen.

In other words, it ain’t paradise. But it was what I could afford last year, namely free. So one makes do.

Well, for this year I’ve made a couple of technical additions. I’ve gotten a new editing program, Adobe Premiere, which includes a special effects generator called After Effects. That’ll take a while to learn, but it will be worth it. I’ve

added a GoPro Hero 3+ camera to my arsenal. You can see the test results of this marvelous little sports camera in two of last year’s episodes, It’s All About the Ride and Doing the Martian March.

And I’ve gotten another new video camera as well, one that I’m seriously excited about. It’s the little camera attached to the underbelly of a Syma X5C-1 quad copter drone. Once it’s up and flying, it’ll add a new dimension to the videos I produce. Think of the advantage of aerial photography. That will help to tell stories in a whole different way. Besides, I’ve always loved flying.In fact, it was the subject of three of my favorite episodes,   Wandering Through the Sky

from "Wandering Through the Sky"

from 2014, Airdance from 2015 and another 2015 show, Drone, which dealt directly with quad copters, in that case my friend Bryan’s Phantom II which chased me around a Lowe’s parking lot where I was skating. 

The video from one of these drones is awesome. And the camera on my Syma quadcopter is surprisingly good, especially given the price I paid for it. But there is one little hang up. Actually flying it. Becoming a drone pilot isn’t as easy as you might think. The drone is remote controlled, of course. The controller has duel joysticks. The right one controls lift, descent and rotation. The left stick controls forward, backward, left and right movement and all the subtle variations in between. Two sets of LED lights on the underside of the

Syma X5C-1 drone

drone designate front from rear so that you know which way to send it. Easy peesy, right? Wrong. All this is tricky and complicated, especially if you aren’t used to it. A kid growing up with an X Box would probably find this easier to sort out than me. Which reminds me of an old Groucho Marx line in which he said, “this is so simple a two year old could figure it out…send me a two year old cause I can’t make heads of tails of it.”

The fact that the owner’s manual, which comes in the box with the quad copter, is actually a translation of Chinese text doesn't make it any easier to figure out. Course, this isn’t much of a surprise since the Syma X5C-1 - like my motorcycle, my coffee maker, my microwave oven and just about everything else I own these days - comes from China. I’m sure that whoever actually did the translation was probably hired because - being bilingual and all - he was considered very clever by the company. However, being bilingual and actually being good at it are two entirely different things. That’s why the user’s manual is rife with practically indecipherable statements like “…when the quad copter battery is not enough, the rotors will be stopped power as the quad copter control system will protected battery automatically” or my favorite, “This product is not a toy but a precisive equipment that integrating mechanics and electronics with expertise of aerodynamics and high-frequency transmitting.” Oh yes, and don’t forget, “This R/C flying model is a high dangerous commodity. Please make sure that it should be flied away from the crowd.”

When I first took the manual out of the box and handed it to the two-year old, he took one look at it and shot himself.

Fortunately, the days when you would be at the mercy of a manual like this one are long in the past. If you need to find lessons in flying, all you have to do is Google it. Just type in the name of the drone and, like magic, up pops a number of sources where you can buy it, written versions of the instructions on how it works and a whole plethora of video tutorials about how to fly it.

 Woot!

Course, don’t put on your flying ace jacket just yet. Just because you can finally make sense of the controls doesn’t mean you can work them any better than that interpreter could translate Chinese into English first time out. That’s why I turned it on in the living room, lifted off and took out a lamp. Hovering isn’t easy. A micro inch one way or the other on the control and you’re into a frigging wall. That’s when I put the blade guards on. Okay, so this is a little like putting training wheels on a bike while you’re learning to ride it (damn good way to get beat up by your older brothers jeering friends) but it’s better than replacing the props. Good thing too. When I took it outside and took off, it veered right into Beach Bum’s tree, which would have been a helluva surprise to him had my kitty been sitting in it at the time. I guess the instruction manual should have read: “Please make sure that it should be flied away from the cat’s tree.“

However, anything worth doing is worth working at to do right. And until I get it down, the results can be comical. So my next episode of The Last Wanderer of Mars will be called Pilot, and not just because I decided to take the junk in one corner of the room and pile it in the other. This will be the chronicle of my journey to become a competent drone pilot.

And here’s a preview of what that will look like.

Like I said at the beginning, this year The Last Wanderer of Mars is going to look different.

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