SIMRISHAMN, SWEDEN: Unmanned aircraft, also known as drones, are revolutionizing warfare. Now, some of that technology is coming home from the war, to amuse us and give us an aerial perspective on our surroundings.
I’ve been trying out a helicopter-type drone called the Phantom. It’s easy to see these agile, relatively stable aircraft being put to a number of uses, from aerial photography to package delivery — at least once the dangers can be managed and the legal issues worked through.
The video camera on the phantom also lets me see in a new way a patch of Swedish countryside that I’ve been to every year since I was a child. It wasn’t a huge epiphany, but it was interesting to see a well-known place from a completely new angle.
The $700 Phantom, made by a Chinese company called DJI, is at the forefront of bringing drone technology to the masses.
Roughly a foot in diameter, the four-propeller craft is sold as a complete unit with only minimal assembly required. The Phantom could be to drones what the Apple II was to computing more than three decades ago — offering one of the first complete, integrated PCs. In any case, some drone enthusiasts consider the Phantom a major milestone.
The Phantom doesn’t come with a built-in camera, but it does have a holder for a GoPro action camcorder, which is what I used. These cameras cost about $200.
Remote-control aircraft have been around for decades. What’s different?
First, the aircraft are much easier to fly, thanks to battery technology, electronics and GPS. The Phantom uses a GPS chip to stay steady in the air, even in a wind, and can stay up for nearly 10 minutes on a single charge of its battery, which uses the same energy-dense technology as smartphones.
The second revolution is “first-person view,” or FPV. That’s when the user can see out of the drone’s camera as it’s flying, freeing the user to send the aircraft out of eyesight and making it easier to capture good video. The military uses advanced FPV to keep drones on patrol over Afghanistan for hours, thousands of miles away from their “pilots.”
It vastly expands the range and usefulness of remote-controlled aircraft. It also expands the amount of mischief you can cause with them, from spying to egg-dropping.
The Phantom is not equipped for FPV out of the box, and I didn’t try any of the $200-plus kits that are available. I had to keep my eyes on the drone and could examine the captured video only after the aircraft was safely back on the ground. This was the drone experience “lite,” but it was an intriguing introduction.
Outside major cities, the Federal Aviation Administration allows remote-control aircraft as long as they’re flown for noncommercial purposes, stay below 400 feet and away from “real” aircraft. A new law passed last year will make it easier to get a license for commercial and government drone use by 2015.
The drone worked well for most of 20-odd flights, but it would still occasionally dart off in a random direction right from the takeoff, just as it did the first time, forcing an emergency “landing.” The airframe proved very sturdy, but the propellers were getting scrubbed pretty hard in these crashes. I had to install a set of plastic propeller guards, costing $15. I consider this a must-have accessory, one I would have liked to see in the original package.
The more interesting videos were captured when flying low. They came out well, except that the vibration of the propellers causes the image to jiggle in waves, left to right across the screen. The Phantom was a lot of fun to fly, but as soon as I wanted to record some really interesting video, it failed me. I wanted to take it up over a rare gathering of extended family and then record the sun rising over some ancient megaliths the next day. But the drone started spinning uncontrollably around its axis, rendering it useless. This may be a calibration issue dealt with by connecting the internal flight computer to my Windows PC.