I hadn’t been flying my DJI Phantom 2 since last year (before I herniated two disks in my neck) but I’ve been meaning to take it out and get it in the the air. This week, two different things happened which provided some incentives to get it in the air, for reasons which weren’t entirely frivolous:

• My new next door neighbor mentioned that there was debris in the drainage ditches up on the hill that drain from his yard to my yard. I thought that it had been cleaned out, so I wanted to be sure, but frankly, hiking up there when the ground is wet is asking for a new herniated disk.
• I had a small roof leak which caused a call to my roofers to come out and have a peek. They mentioned that I had a fair number of busted tiles on my roof (annoying, perhaps broken by our contractors during last years remodel?).

I hadn’t flown in a while, so I decided that rather than flying over my house, I’d begin by just getting the view of the drainage ditches. I got the copter charged up again, reviewed my checklists, and took it out into the backyard.

Oddly, I heard a familiar droning: one of my neighbors had a quadcopter up doing a high pass over the neighborhood. By the time I was ready though, it had sailed back off to the south. I got it up in the air and tried to get my coordination back. It was a beautiful day for flying.

Here’s a nice high view to the north east from my house, fairly high up.

But that wasn’t what I was after: I aimed the GoPro down and flew fairly low over my hill to get these pictures. This is the view of the lower of the two drainage ditches. It’s got a little silt in it, but is pretty clear. It might be worthwhile to do a concrete patch of the seam. You can also see a fair number of gopher holes up on the hill.

The other ditch is at the top of the hill. It actually gets a lot less water, so the silt settles out pretty well up there, and I’ve got some grass growing it. It could definitely use some work to clear it.

Very nice! Perhaps next weekend I’ll do a flight over the house and see if I can identify broken roof tiles. I’m pretty glad I didn’t have to hike up there to check it out. Kind of wish I had an FPV setup. Perhaps I’ll get that going in the not-too-distant future.