It was inevitable. In June 2020, after a month of watching tutorials and practising on a simulator, my first FPV drone arrived in the mail: the iFlight Green Hornet, a tiny cinewhoop. Here's where my FPV journey begins.
Falling for FPV
It had been a while since my last video. Work and kids really absorb all my time. But there was news: I'm getting into FPV. In the last month I'd watched tons of hours of videos to understand how to get into it properly, and I'd been playing on a simulator with my controller. Then the box arrived.
The Green Hornet
iFlight sent me the Green Hornet to review, along with spare sets of propellers, and it looks amazing. This was the beast I'd been dreaming of. Everything from China takes ages to arrive, and there were no suppliers in Europe, so it had become a bit of an obsession. It's a cinewhoop: really small and light, designed for flying indoors and around people, so even if you bounce off something nobody gets hurt. And I can mount a GoPro on it to start shooting cinematic footage.
Can I fly it yet? No. My controller (which I bought from Banggood) was still on its way from China, I didn't have goggles yet (I was leaning towards Fat Shark), and I still had to figure out how to configure it in Betaflight. Oh, and I realised the batteries I'd asked for weren't in the box. Not even one. I'd written to iFlight and I was sure they'd sort it out.
Nothing like a normal drone
I was scared of the FPV world at the beginning. Now I'm starting to understand how it works, and how hard it actually is. FPV drones have nothing to do with the drones we're used to, where you press a button and they hover. Forget that. Your two thumbs control everything, all the time, and I was trying to develop my own technique just to hover and move around.
I'm not pretending to teach you how to fly FPV. I just want to share my journey of learning it. I'd been playing a lot on the DRL Simulator and was planning to try Liftoff, which so many reviewers recommend. In a simulator, at least you don't break anything.