Pay attention to the wind at altitude!!

From my meteorology background, the winds aloft (1000 feet and above) are typically 30 degrees clockwise compared to the surface winds, in the Northern Hemisphere. This is due to the Coriolis force and the earth's surface friction. You can see this on a day where there are multiple cloud layers. The lower clouds moving in one direction, and the ones above them in a different direction. At 400', they wouldn't be at full deflection, but a portion of the 30 degrees depending on the local surroundings. Something to keep in mind.

I like to take her up to 400' and enter Atti mode. Let her drift about 10 seconds will give you a really good indication of direction and speeds aloft.

Love the distances you guys are going. I'm a distance junky myself, but only stand at 8025' so far. I need an unobstructed area to test more, but the weather is miserable in Upstate NY now. 15-20 degrees F, and we just got 2 feet of snow in the last three days.

SD
 
Be careful up there. Right after some minor rain here in NYC last weekend, I took the P3 up around 400ft. There was no wind on the ground, and suddenly the clouds started moving pretty quick and the P3 was going backwards while doing RTH, I was lucky that it was pretty close to home point, so I just dropped down below 200ft and got it back.
Hi DiluxEdition. I am Newb from NYC. Any spots you suggest to fly?
 
Hi DiluxEdition. I am Newb from NYC. Any spots you suggest to fly?
Kissena Park, near the velodrome, but don't fly over the velodrome, the signs clearly say not to fly there. best to fly from the baseball fields. be responsible though, its against NYC park regulations to fly in NYC parks, but the park police have only given warnings... don't ever fly with park police present. nypd are usual cool and enjoy watching us fly, a couple retired cops also frequent kissena to fly... it does get crowded on the phantom 3 frequencies though, usually we can manage 2 P3 flying at the same time, but once a third or fourth goes up you get lots of No Signal even within a few feet. There are about 8 or so people who have P3 or inspires that fly there, so you may end up getting bad signal if you go too far...
 
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That is an awesome video & he would have never found his Phantom had he come up short over the mountain forest of Endor! :)

this is cool but there is a youtuber who posted a distance flight launched from a mountain - nearly 25000 feet total flight down the valley and made it back and landed in atti mode with 2% battery !!!! All with screen record running so you get to feel it minute by minute
 
For all that watched my vid, surely you noticed the shitty horizon tilt most of the time. Sometimes it's level though, I just don't get it. Anyway, did we ever find a good fix for this that doesn't involve sending it in? I always get errors when trying to gimbal calibrate during flight too.
 
Kissena Park, near the velodrome, but don't fly over the velodrome, the signs clearly say not to fly there. best to fly from the baseball fields. be responsible though, its against NYC park regulations to fly in NYC parks, but the park police have only given warnings... don't ever fly with park police present. nypd are usual cool and enjoy watching us fly, a couple retired cops also frequent kissena to fly... it does get crowded on the phantom 3 frequencies though, usually we can manage 2 P3 flying at the same time, but once a third or fourth goes up you get lots of No Signal even within a few feet. There are about 8 or so people who have P3 or inspires that fly there, so you may end up getting bad signal if you go too far...
Thank you for the info. I have been flying in Flushing Meadow Park. There is a dedicated helicopter area there. I was flying in the south side of the park 2 weeks ago and one of the park officers told me I could fly but it would have to be in the dedicated helicopter area. Go figure. Also, I have searched for any regulations for NYC parks and I can't find any. Do you know where I can find that info?
 
Come on, you can tell us...................................................... did you have to change your drawers?! :D
 
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Yeah I've hoped they'd include an anemometer on-board for real time wind speed and direction, to help with this scenarios.
I agree that it would be really good if the DJI GO app could estimate wind speed and direction. Healthy Drones does this now using just the data logged by the app, so it's clearly possible.
 
Do you wear a skirt???? you must... HUGE ONES to fly 3 miles over the water in what had to be winds over 15mph.
 
Do you wear a skirt???? you must... HUGE ONES to fly 3 miles over the water in what had to be winds over 15mph.

Nah, I go commando! Honestly, losing control of it from 400ft up over land isn't gonna save me much money, and where I live flying over water is the only long flight option. I'm a bit of an adrenaline junky and flying circles bores me a bit. Really looking forward to trying the follow me function when I get down to the keys in June to try and track a big fish when we get one on.
 
Winds were 20+ out over the water, I had no idea. I turned around at ~19000 ft at 73% battery! Landed with 11%.
 
this is cool but there is a youtuber who posted a distance flight launched from a mountain - nearly 25000 feet total flight down the valley and made it back and landed in atti mode with 2% battery !!!! All with screen record running so you get to feel it minute by minute

This one?
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That was intense. That guy coulda landed in that valley at ~15% but he went for it!
 
I thought it landed on its own at 8%
 
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Yup thats the one - he flew all that way in atti mode to conserve a bit more power...
 
If you get a good weather app you can look up " winds aloft " it will tell you about the winds higher up... I have seen winds actually go in different direction on the ground vs high in the air...

When I was flying balloons we called them box winds. We had a really good box wind one day, and in a one hour flight overflew the same spot 3 times and landed within 500 meters of our launch point.
 

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