I was told a cautionary tale about a boy who got a drone. It cost several hundred dollars and was as top of the line as you can get. He charged up the battery. He went through his pre-flight check. He set it all up at a park and lifted of gracefully. Then promptly set it down in a lake. <\/p>\n
Plunk! Goodbye expensive drone. <\/p>\n
I thought of this story as my daughter and I set up her drone for its first flight in a park down the street. Big, menacing oaks with mighty claws loomed over us. Cars passed by on the street within controller range. Obstacles and dangers were everywhere.<\/p>\n
But that wouldn\u2019t be us. I was going to be careful with her new Christmas present. I watched a Youtube video! <\/p>\n
\u201cThe key,\u201d I told my daughter, \u201cis to take it slow. Go easy and don\u2019t liftoff too fast. I\u2019ll go first because I have experience with these things. I\u2019ll just hover it about eye level and then land it carefully. OK? It\u2019s not going to be super exciting, but it will be safe and cautious.\u201d
\n<\/p>\n
With that, it lifted off. It went straight up. Fast. And it kept going up. And up. TOO UP! And the wind started catching it. It started drifting. I started screaming like a caffeinated monkey: \u201cCan\u2019t control it. Which way is left?!? Which way is down?!? Watch out for the tree!!! Who am I talking to?!?\u201d Then it started coming down. TOO DOWN! And crashed, right into the street. <\/p>\n
\u201cDad!\u201d my daughter cried, racing after it. \u201cYou killed my drone!\u201d<\/p>\n
I expected it would be in pieces. Or would burst into flames. Or a bus would run over it. Somehow it survived to fly again. <\/p>\n
We don\u2019t really know what we\u2019re doing. We\u2019ve watched more Youtube videos and put notes on index cards that say things like: \u201cRight might be right unless it\u2019s left\u201d and \u201cDon\u2019t plunk it in a lake. Expensive!\u201d<\/p>\n
How the drone is still working is beyond me. We crash-landed it upside down on a basketball court. We got it stuck up in a tree. We let it drift so high that it threatened to wing off to Daytona with a flock of pelicans. <\/p>\n
But we\u2019re starting to get the hang of it, and now we\u2019re testing out the video camera mounted below it. We made several films at a local park of our semi-successful flights. <\/p>\n
They\u2019re pretty horrible. Blades of grass as it skims along the ground. The ground approaching as it plummets out of the sky like a 500-pound bomb. A nice shot of the sewage treatment plant as it spins out of control. <\/p>\n
And then, a perfect shot. It rises cleanly from the ground. A man and his daughter stand together, staring wide-eyed at this hovering marvel. The girl starts jumping and waving as she runs toward it. Sheer joy. Smiling. It captures just a moment or two before the camera swings away. But for those couple of seconds, for father and daughter together, it was the perfect flight. And a scene I will watch over and over forever. Even if it did end when the drone crashed violently into a dumpster. <\/p>\n
Plunk!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I was told a cautionary tale about a boy who got a drone. It cost several hundred dollars and was as top of the line as you can get. He charged up the battery. He went through his pre-flight check. He set it all up at a park and lifted of gracefully. Then promptly set it down in a lake. Plunk! Goodbye expensive drone. I thought of this story as my daughter and I set up her drone for its first flight in a park down the street. Big, menacing oaks with mighty claws loomed over us. Cars passed by on the street within controller range. Obstacles and dangers were everywhere. But that wouldn\u2019t be us. I was going to be careful with her new Christmas present. I watched a Youtube video! \u201cThe key,\u201d I told my daughter, \u201cis to take it slow. Go easy and don\u2019t liftoff too fast. I\u2019ll go first because I have experience with these things. I\u2019ll just hover it about eye level and then land it carefully. OK? It\u2019s not going to be super exciting, but it will be safe and cautious.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[554,556,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1537","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2016-nutshells","category-holidays","category-parenthoodandchildren"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nutshellcity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1537","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nutshellcity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nutshellcity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nutshellcity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nutshellcity.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1537"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.nutshellcity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1537\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1538,"href":"https:\/\/www.nutshellcity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1537\/revisions\/1538"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nutshellcity.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1537"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nutshellcity.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1537"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nutshellcity.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1537"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}