But I like to think of it as a way of quickly turning something very simple into something extremely complex by getting caught up and entangled in the minutia and then not being able to let it go.
Case in point: I want to fly my quadcopter drone like a pro. I can’t. Yet. I keep trying. I still suck. Hence the obsession.
It wasn’t much of an obsession when I ordered the thing from Amazon on Black Monday a couple of months ago because it was only the camera I was thinking of. It and a GoPro were to be added to my inventory of cameras to enhance the shows I make for my YouTube channel with point-of-view and scenic aerial shots. I never gave flying the drone any thought. My good friend Bryan has a DJI Phantom II which I featured in a Last Wanderer of Mars episode called Drone last year. And he made it look easy.
Unfortunately, I had to learn the hard way that it is not. Starting from zero experience at the controls, I’ve used the instruction manual and YouTube tutorial videos to try to learn how to fly the drone. In other words, it’s been a frustrating series of trial and error -- sadly enough, mostly error.
Last time out I wrote about finding a nice size field behind the Artegon Mall that looked perfect for a flight test. But it quickly turned into a total crash-and-burn test since the controller had somehow gotten switched into mode two, a sort of Bizzaro-world partly-inverted version of default, which is mode one. So, next day, I went hunting for another good size field to take her up again.
This time I drove out to Cypress Grove Park, which is this huge, beautiful park on the shores of Lake Jessamine. This place is a total mystery to me. It features a majestic drive through the gate down a long cypress-covered driveway to the lake and some fine old historic buildings. It caters to weddings, and yet it’s in the middle of one of the worst and most dangerous neighborhoods in Orlando. I know. I used to live there. Go figure. But between the lake and the entrance is a wide expanse of open grassy field separated here and there with short white fences that give it a vaguely equestrian feel, although I can’t imagine anybody in that part of town owning a horse. Nonetheless, it was a perfect place for me to send up my quadcopter.
I drove through the gate and pulled off into a parking lot that faced the open grassy space. I parked my bike at the side of the road where it would be out of the way, opened the boot and took out the drone. One of the reasons I picked this particular quad copter model in the first place is because it and the controller fits snuggly in the luggage boot on the back of my motorcycle. I took them both out and marched into the field, documenting my movements on video with one of my other cameras. Once I reached the middle of the field, I turned on the drone, turned on its camera, took a deep breath and then sent her up.
The drone rose beautifully into the blue Florida sky. Using the right-hand controls I moved her to the left, stopped and then swung back to the right. She responded. So far so good. I pushed the right lever forward and she shot ahead, still rising. She was getting pretty far away from me, so I pulled the lever back, which should have put her into reverse. But something was wrong. She seemed to be slowing, but she was still drifting forward. I pushed the lever forward. She titled her front down and moved forward like she was supposed to. I pulled the lever back. Once again, she seemed to slow a little, but she didn’t fly back. Now she was so far away that she was barely a white dot. She was like a dog that had run off and refused to come back. She was flying away. I didn’t know what to do. So I panicked and cut the power. I watched her drop out of the sky and fall into a distant clump of trees.
I just stood there holding the controller with both hands, staring blankly into empty space. The experience at the Artegon Mall was infuriating. This was worse. It was like the final blow. I only had my craft in the air for a few seconds. Not even a full minute. Just a few seconds. And she’d simply flown away. Now she was gone. And there wasn’t a damned thing I could do about it. So I just stared.
When it finally became clear that wistful thinking was not going to bring my drone soaring back to me, I began slowly walking out of the field, back to my bike with the now useless controller hanging from one hand by my side. I felt like a fool. An idiot. An imbecile. A bumbling, incompetent moron. Stupid. No, worse. Inept. Ridiculous. And seriously Lame. But oddly enough, not angry. Maybe it was that I’d almost expected something like this. I figured the drone was a goner and I was wondering, in a disgusted sort of way, if I should even bother to buy another one and try again when something in the distance caught my eye.
It was a small white spot standing out against the bright green of the grass I could see through a stand of trees a good quarter mile away. Could it be that the drone wasn’t lost, I thought, staring at the spot, but had landed there instead? I didn’t know. That little white patch of something could be a discarded newspaper, a McDonalds bag or a rock or almost anything. I certainly didn’t want to get my hopes up, but I quickened my pace to the bike anyway. When I got there I casually put the controller back in the boot and put my helmet on. Every now and then I glanced back and the mysterious white spot, hoping it hadn’t walked away.
It didn’t. I drove all the way back to the park entrance. There, on the lawn by the side of the road, was my drone. She had come down inside a clump of Cypress trees to land upright on the grass in between them. I was beyond surprised. Had I cut the power a second sooner, she’d be snuggly in the branches at the top of a tree. Had I cut it a few seconds later, she’d have come down in the road. I put her back in the boot. There was no point in pressing my luck.
But I wasn’t done for the day. Just down the road on the corner of Holden Avenue and Orange Blossom Trail is a long defunct shopping center with a still-open Auto Zone store on one end and an Aldi Supermarket on the other. In between are a lot of empty stores and facing them is a huge empty parking lot. I used to like to ride skateboards there. So I nicknamed the area Ghetto Skateland.
I stopped there to buy a bottle of Winking Owl Merlot at Aldi. I’m still not sure what made me decide to take the drone out for one more flight at Ghetto Skateland. Maybe it was the good memories of the place. I remember one time when I was skating and pulled off a really nice maneuver of some kind and had two garishly dressed hookers (common on OBT) standing on the sidewalk give me a round of applause. You don’t soon forget something like that.
The flight was everything the flight at Cypress Grove Park wasn’t. I had decent control. She didn’t fly away from me. She responded to each command like an eager puppy. Even landing wasn’t bad. For the first time since I started learning to fly the thing, it was fun.
Maybe, I thought, just maybe, I’d be able to get this right after all.
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