I’m getting more confident flying the DJI Phantom 2, which means that I’m closer to having my first crash as I try to do more aggressive things. Mind you, the Phantom 2 pretty much has training wheels on it: no matter how hard you lean the stick to one side or the other, the copter will actually not doing anything blindly stupid. But still, immediately after launch, I flew across our soccer field and came closer to hitting the trees on the other side than I normally would like. After that, I just tried to do a bit of flying, doing overpasses of my head, trying to get used to turning left and right with the copter facing me and away from me… in general, just getting used to flying.

I did a couple of fun things: got a view of the 6′ tall seagull on top of one of our buildings, and a high angle shot of the main building here.

I did have one issue on this flight that’s hard to see: toward the end, I appeared to lose contact, and the copter took off to its “home location”, wherever that may be, but seemed to be toward our parking lot. A few seconds later, I managed to get control again and brought it back and landed without incident. Still, I should RTFM about how to set and recover from such an occurrence.