Alright, so you've gone through, you've had a look at that checklist, you've walked out the door, you've caught your train your content, you've actually got all your equipment and your drone and everything with you. So that's all working well, you actually arrive on site at wherever it is that you want to take your fantastic video of you and maybe it's a gorgeous beach or, you know, Sunset over a mountain or whatever it might be. This particular area and section of the course is about managing the actual flying of the drone while you're there. So, to begin with, and I mentioned this a bit in the sort of security and, you know, safety aspects of section two. But people just in general are pretty horrible at judging, 3d sort of spatial orientated shapes and things. We're not very good at judging things and that sort of stuff then when you're talking about a drone, that's very Far away, it's very difficult to sort of tell exactly how close it is to things.

And it can mean that it makes it a lot easier for you to actually fly the drone into something Cordova. And whilst This is obviously applicable everywhere where you're flying your drone, it's even worse when you're added a new location, not just because you're at a new location, and you don't know the area, it's a different country, a different location. There's things you've never seen before, but also because you get a bit distracted, because usually you're going out to fly the drone to get some fantastic views and some test fantastic videos of things. You actually want to see those great places as well. So your attention can be quite divided between flying the drone and doing that and actually looking and enjoying your holiday and seeing these fantastic things. So the other thing is that when we're talking about 3d spatial awareness, it's hard enough in real life when you're actually flying your drone and you've got your mobile phone on the controller and you're actually you know, viewing your drone through it, you're seeing a 2d representation of a 3d world.

So that just makes things even harder. So you really got to be careful with these sorts of things and making sure that you don't accidentally fly into lots of different obstacles and things that could be out there. So on top of that 3d spatial awareness problem that everyone just naturally has, again, when you're looking at the drone through your mobile phone, usually you're out during the day, unless you're flying during the night with special permission or something. But most of the time you're out in the day, it's very sunny, you've got a mobile screen, it's very difficult to see that screen in the direct sunlight. You can get hoods for things which do make things easier, but either way, it's gonna make things more difficult to see on the screen and together with the fact that you're in a new location. You know, you might not notice very small things.

A lot of people have crashed their drones when flying into power lines or things like that. They're looking at their screen at it. Tiny little screen and you can't actually make out the power lines as you're flying towards it so you literally don't see it on your actual screen, they fly directly into it and there goes their drone. There could be other small obstacles you know, maybe a bird comes out of nowhere or something like that and obviously you're not going to see it on the screen. Lots of things that can go wrong if you're in a sort of touristy spot or a you know public location, that's quite often that you know, people that are standing around or maybe you know, going to the same location as well. I'll come up to you they'll sort of see you know, what are you doing you flying a drone it's still relatively new and a lot of people are just genuinely interested in it.

They may not be a park ranger telling you off or something like that. Hopefully not. But then they just want to know hey, what drone is that? You know, where are you flying? Can I have a look at this photo and this was not being a particularly bad thing can distract you from doing it. You know, you might be flying concentrating.

Someone comes up says Hey, what are you doing sort of look up you Your attention is taken away for a minute. And you know, the drone drifts off into a tree or you know, something like that. So it's for this reason that I usually recommend that you have, you know, a partner or maybe a friend or just someone, if you can, it's not always possible, especially when you're traveling, some people travel on their own. But if it's possible, have someone sort of spotting you. And this is another reason why a lot of countries demand that you have visual line of sight with the actual drone. Because, you know, when you're just looking at it on the screen, it's very, very difficult to get that 3d awareness.

You can't see everything that small objects, you know, lots of things can and do go wrong. So they insist that you physically be able to look up and see your drone in a proper 3d environment and just get a better sense of where the drone is in relation to everything else. So that's one of the main reasons why most countries have that visual line of sight law and I quite frankly, think it's pretty good because it not only stops other people from potentially getting injured if your drone does crash, you know, Wildlife, people property, all that sorts of stuff. But, you know, these things are not cheap. This is, you know, almost about two grand Australian worth of drone when it was purchased. And I don't know about you, but I don't like saying $2,000 pull out of the sky.

So at least when I'm not catching it, so lots and lots of different things can go wrong. And you do still have to be mindful of that, especially when you're in a new place. And there's lots of things that you may not be aware of. Another big thing is wind, you know, you might be used to how much wind you get in your own country at home, but perhaps you're flying your drone in Iceland, and you don't particularly know that they have a huge Southern gust of wind that has even reportedly ripped doors of cars. So that's at the ground level as well. You can only imagine what it's like up there.

You know, DJI drones do warn you when there's severe wind, but perhaps as a huge gust and a blows, you're thrown into the tree. You're not really going to be aware of that coming from a different country. So you do really have to be extra careful. So while that basically covers most of the actual flight day kind of things you've got to kind of look out for, I also want to just go through a quick sort of, you know, top 10 style list of common ways that people just crush their drone in general. Now, this is so that you just kind of have that information in the back of your head and you know what to look out for, and just what to be careful of. A lot of people don't know about certain things, and especially with drones, they can get very, very complicated, as I've said, they will just think that toys and don't sort of read the manual in full, but they are quite a bit more complicated.

And there's quite a bit more at stake as well. If you start off sorry, the number one way that people crash their drones and these sort of ways that people have been crashing their drones. This has been found through years and years of sort of going over logs and data of crashed drones and flying finding out what the cause of it was, and then amassing all the results and seeing what are the most common ones. So the number one way is what's called a CSC or combination stick command. So this is where, at least on DJI drones, you actually pull the sticks down and inwards, or the other one is down and outwards. So those two commands do the same thing.

And what that is, is basically just shut off the actual drone itself, the rotors stop spinning, the whole thing shuts down. And it's supposed to be once you've landed the drone, you do that command and it will shut down the drone. But, you know, sometimes you're flying around and maybe someone distracts you they're coming over asking, oh, what drone is that? You know, is that a maverick or, you know, Phantom or something. And maybe you're flying that way. And you also sort of accidentally caught this way for a few seconds and drone shots down, falls out of the sky, injure someone, you know, just keep that in mind whenever someone comes to talk to you, you know Just basically like dog, the sticks have the dirt over there, make sure you don't do that combination.

So that's the number one way. The second way is actually from when propellers fly off the actual drone. So, as you can see, with this one, it's got the quick release propellers, and these are on most new drones as well. But some of the older ones don't have them where you actually have to screw them on. And sometimes if you don't screw them on tight enough, they'll actually be fine to take off because they're not spinning particularly quickly. But once they get to full height, and you know you're flying really quickly or something, they're spending a lot faster, they fly off and dangos your drone again.

So if you've got one of the newer drones, like the Mavic probe or the Mavic, two Pro, or Mavic to zoom, obviously don't have to worry about that as long as it's clicked on properly. You know, it's all good. But that's just another top why that, you know, generally more older drones have actually gone down and crashed in the past. The next big one of people crashing is what's called return to home crashes. So this is where, you know, if you lose signal to your actual drone, you know, maybe you accidentally fly behind a building or maybe, you know, you accidentally fly behind a hill or something like that, or maybe you just fly too far away. And the signal between your controller and your drone is cut off and it can't re establish it.

A lot of drones have an automatic return to home mode. So this is where they will fly up to a certain height ceiling that's pre programmed in the actual drone, and then just basically fly directly back to the return to home location, which is usually set when you actually take off. So this is a really good feature, especially if you just for whatever reason, lose connectivity to your drone. It can save you having to go over to the actual drone as well. But what can actually be a problem is especially when you're traveling, you're by nature going to a new location, you're going to somewhere where you haven't found Before, and you might have set the return to home altitude to 50 meters, because in your local area where you usually fly your drone, there's nothing around that's really higher than 50 meters, maybe there's a couple of trees, but that's about it.

But maybe now you're flying, you know, in a city area or something like that, you have permission to do so in the country laws allowance. And perhaps there's buildings that are much higher than 50 meters and you travel to that new destination and slides behind one of these buildings accidentally and lose the signal. This will automatically trigger this return to home protocol. And because the last set height altitude is 50 meters, what's it going to do fly up to 50 meters and then start flying directly back and if that building is higher than 50 meters, is this going to fly straight into that building. Now, again, on some of the newer drones, this isn't as big of a problem because they have forward facing obstacle avoidance and some of them even actually fly around the building or whatever the obstacle is. So, you know, it's not as bad as it seems it's not just gonna fly directly into the building and crashed.

But this has been, you know, the third biggest sort of cause of people crashing their drones in the past. So it's definitely something to be aware of, especially considering, obviously wanting to go and travel with your drone. Make sure when you get to a new location that you just have a bit of a look around and make sure that you're, you know, your max altitude is set appropriately for the country, maybe it's only 50 meters, or 100 or 150 meters, whatever it is, but also that your return to home altitude is appropriately set for the area that you're actually in and there's no giant buildings that are 150 meters tall or something like that. So that's the return to home era. It's pretty popular with people crushing their drones that way, so just be aware of it. All right, next up on this quick list is running out of battery now, for me flying drones for a while.

I still can't really understand how some people can You know, crush their drawing this way, when you're drawing gets to 20 25% maybe 15% battery left, it's gonna stop beeping at you, at least with the DJI drones. It is incredibly annoying, this thing will go very, very loud beeping constantly, you can't stop it, it'll beep for you know, maybe five or 10 straight minutes just repeating over and over again, it's really really annoying, but it's for a good reason it's telling you to bring that drone back because you are going to run out of battery sooner or later. And once it gets to the point where it can sustain a lot anymore, it will just forcibly land the drone wherever it is. And unfortunately for a lot of people this is into like so into trees or other types of areas where it's crashed a drone because they've run out of battery.

One slight thing that can kind of catch people out, especially again in new locations I haven't flown up is they might see on their actual you know, bar back Train lots of stocks to buy have enough battery to get back for what they don't realize is that wind was pushing the drone out to where they're going. But when they're flying back, that same wind will be resisting the drone. So the actual battery meter itself might say, yeah, sure you've got enough battery to get back. But as you stop flying back towards yourself to return home, that extra wind pushing the drone means that you need even more battery to get back. So this reason I always sort of recommend, you know, don't try and go right to the, you know, orange or red bar or something like that of just being able to get back just in time with just enough battery.

You want to give yourself a decent bit of margin just in case there's a there's that extra bit of wind so that you aren't one of those people that crashes the drone by running out of battery. Now, the other sort of couple of other reasons that people quite often crush the drone is not having visual line of sight they're flying only via the screen and This has, as I said before a number of different problems, you can fly into sort of really small things like power lines, which is very common, you can just misjudge things because you're looking at a 2d screen versus a 3d world and you just misjudge how close you are to that tree, or how close you are to that fence or something or whatever it is in crash goes your drone. So these are all sorts of things that come from not having visual line of sight of your drawing, that's, again, a very common way that lots of people crash the drone.

And finally, the sort of main way that people crash their drones is actually by flying backwards and flying backwards into things like trees, all that sort of stuff. Now, again, with some of the more higher priced and newer drones that actually have rear facing object avoidance, which works very well and they will stop the drone automatically from flying into things. But on even relatively new ones mean this is a maverick pro in this house for tasting sensors, but as you can see doesn't have anything on In the real and so there are still a number of drones out there that have, you know, object avoidance, possibly, but not really facing object avoidance. So just be aware, if you are ever flying backwards, just make sure there is plenty and plenty and plenty of clearance in either direction. So as you can see, there's, unfortunately, a lot of different sort of, you know, ways that you can unexpectedly crash your drone.

And, as I said before, the best way, the absolute best way to sort of prevent this a lot of the time is, one, do a fair bit of practice, you know, to just be aware of your surroundings, especially when you're traveling, it's going to be very different to anywhere else that you've flown before. And three, most importantly, have someone with you get a friend, get your partner, you know, even if there's someone who's come up and is just generally interested in the drone and you're just traveling on your own. Just ask if they can just sort of watch the drone, they're probably going to be looking at it anyway if they're interested and just sort of let you know Anything sort of out of left field comes to threaten your drone, you know, maybe you're, you know, focusing on getting that fantastic shot and how you're actually controlling the drone and you're really concentrating and looking at your actual screen and all that sort of stuff.

Maybe you can still see the drone, you're still in visual line of sight, but you're just, you know, lining up to shot and all that sort of stuff. And you don't realize that there's a whole bunch of birds coming towards your for your drone or anything like that someone standing behind behind you or next to you who actually doubted sort of, you know, bonked you on the shoulder and say, hey, look out for all those birds or, hey, look out for that, you know, tree, you know, I'm standing over here and I can see from my direction that you're actually quite close to it, whereas you looking at it on the screen or from this direction can actually say that you're very close to it. So a second person standing next to you is hugely, hugely helpful. At the very least I can kind of stop people from distracting you or coming up and ask me questions or they can Talk to the person and answer their questions and you know, chat away while you concentrate on actually doing your job and flying the drone and getting those shots.

It's very, very important. It's just a fantastic way to sort of make sure that you don't have any of those issues with crashing your drone. So once you've actually taken the video on the day and you've returned home from your travels, make sure that you back everything up, I recommend taking the SD card out straightaway and backing it up to at least two different sources. So say a laptop and a portable hard drive or something like that. You know, perhaps you take it out the next day and the drone, God forbid, does have an accident to it. You're not just losing your drone, you're losing all the data and all the other footage on the SD card as well.

So make sure you at least back it up every day once you actually get home from doing flying. Back up on the two sources as I said because you are traveling you're moving around you know things get bumps you know, perhaps the hardest falls off the table or something and smashes into a million pieces day goes or your daughter, at least you've got a copy on the laptop or something like that. The other thing is that, again, you're traveling. And unfortunately, what happens to a lot of people when they're traveling is they get pickpocketed or their bags get stolen, perhaps their bags get lost by the, you know, airport people or anything like that. There's 100 different things that can go wrong. So I find having it in two extra sources like a laptop and a harddrive is really good.

Indeed, you can. As I said, you know, SD cards can fill up pretty quickly but try and keep it the third sort of original copy, just keep it on the SD card, you know, keep tabs on it, make sure that you still have enough room to record if you're going in another part. But if you can keep it on the SD card inside the actual drone in that way, you've actually got three different copies of the actual footage until you at least get home. The other possible thing that you can do is actually upload it to Cloud Storage. Sometimes, you know the internet Connect tivity that you have while you're traveling might not be enough, you know, if it's just a Airbnb rental or something like that they might not have the fastest internet connection, or maybe the, you know, the actual video files themselves are just too big to actually upload to the cloud or something.

But if you do have that capability, I definitely recommend it as well. And that's everything. Everything that you need to know to actually, you know, go overseas and take those fantastic videos and photos with your drone. As I said at the start traveling with the drone is actually a bit more intricate and complicated than a lot of people sort of first thing and I think you'll find that if you do start traveling with your drone, you're really really love it. You can get that new perspective on things, you can see things that you otherwise wouldn't get to see if you're just taking photos on the ground. And it's just a fantastic experience.

Often, you know, when you're actually traveling, going to those tourist spots, they're the best things you know, it's not just taking a photo of your local Park or something that might be a bit boring, they're fantastic castles or beautiful beaches or mountains or countryside and all that sorts of stuff. So it's often the best experience and the best videos that come from drones are from when people are traveling. Alright, so although that concludes the formal part of the course, there is a bit of bonus content over next where I just include a whole bunch of just bits and pieces and tips and tricks specifically aimed at people traveling overseas and taking drone photography while they're traveling. So feel free to have a look at that and enjoy those extra tips. If you want more information, I do have my own actual website at Alec Schulman Comm.

So you can go take a look at that it's got fantastic news and information about the latest sort of things not just drones, but other technology. It's also got more courses like my very famous one on how to pay off your mortgage in under 10 years. There's also a DJI drone specific course on how to become Ultimate pilot that is hours and hours and hours of really detailed stuff about everything you need to know about DJI drones if you've got one. And if you have enjoyed this course I'd really really love it if you left a review as well. It's really meaningful. I read every single one of them and it really helps sort of let other students know about the content about how good the course is, and just helps me teach more people.

So it's fantastic all around. So that's concluded the course and I hope to see you again in one of my other ones. So have a good day.