Perviously: Young boy falls in love with a hobby he can’t afford, 30 years later, he get’s his first drone, and manages to make almost all the mistakes in the book.

So, my drone is ready for its first flight… Taken back to that same spot in the backyard, I cross my fingers, which make it really hard to operate the remote controller, so I un-cross my fingers and get ready to go.

I plug the battery in, the loudest tones are coming off my drone, all pre-flight-checks passed (lights blinks in right order and colors, no low-battery anywhere…) and I position the remote’s sticks to kick off the engines…. so far all is great.

I push the left stick up as slowly as I can, and then…. TAKE OFF! My Drone is actually flying. I was so excited I just let it hover for a few seconds before I realized I should do something with it…. so I start carefully moving the sticks on my remote… (good thing they are made of this rough surface because the sweat on my fingers would probably cause it to crash at this point)…

I try to figure out what sticks movement cause what drone movement, rotation, elevation, forward, backwards, sideways… I think I’m getting the drift, so I start guiding it around my backyard….

It flies so beautifully in front of me, hovering over the grass, the same grass that is protected by my large tree, the same tree that …. BLOCKS GPS CONTROL! my drone is looking like it’s fear of eights is kicking in again, and yet again the drone ignores my remote and just start going like crazy, and crash into my lawn… giving it some last spins of a great lawn-mower that both puts the engines to a complete stop, and paints my propellers with a nice and fresh shade of natural green…

But at least, it made its first flight…

After a relatively quick recharge, I’m ready for my next attempt, still not realizing that my backyard is probably the worst place to practice flying a GPS oriented drone!

This time my daughter was around to document my attempts.

And since a video worth a thousand words:

One of the landings (or should I say crashing) ended up on one of the small rocks in my backyard and broke the camera holder…. good thing I was smart enough to practice without a camera (and of course I didn’t get my camera yet…. but… I promise I wouldn’t have tried it with the camera at this point… trust me… really…. no really….)