I’ve been passionate about flight ever since I was a kid. Dreams of being an astronaut and a fighter pilot danced through my head constantly throughout my youth. In high school, I was dealt the bad news that I would likely be neither of those things: I had asthma, bad eyes, and I was too tall. These we individually enough to require waivers, and together, a fatal combination to my plans.

I have bounced around through many other fields in my life, as detailed in previous posts, but aviation has always been nearby. Model rocketry ebbs and flows in my timeline, as does flight simulator work. My previous and current positions are both in aerospace, and I am regularly part of flight test teams.

The company I work for now has many Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) programs. Many of the staff are both standard and RC pilots. After a few months there, I decided that I wanted to get into flying RC, something I had been interested in as a kid, but never had the cash to get involved in. I decided to jump into the First Person View (FPV) quadcopter craze and go full bore.

And what a trip that has been!

First off – there is an incredible amount of research to be done:

• What size quad to get (Whoop, 3″-8″, etc.)?
• What batteries to use (4s/6s/11ty-S)?
• What style (Freestyle, Cinematic, Racing)?
• What video equipment (Analog or DJI)?
• Pre-built or DIY?

I’m pretty darned handy with most things electrical and mechanical, so I chose to go the DIY route. That opened up a whole other can of worms:

• What frame to buy?
• What motors?
• What propellors?
• What electronic speed controllers?
• What radio system?
• What video transmitter?
• and on and on.

I slowly consumed everything that I could find on the web, watched tons of Joshua Bardwell and Rotor Riot videos (check them both out on Youtube, they’re phenomenal), looked at other folks’ assemblies on rotorbuilds.com, and honed in on what I was going to buy. A few clicks later on Amazon, and the parts were coming to my door.

That was the easy part. After everything arrived, I spent an entire weekend sorting out how everything needed to be laid out in the frame and connected. I powered it up, and for the first time, heard the wonderful “doo-dee-doo….dooo dooooo.” No magic smoke escaped, so I hadn’t wired anything too wrong. I did find that two of the motors were spinning backwards, which meant I had to swap some wires, but otherwise, everything worked after tweaking some configurations in the flight controller software. And that was it!

Time to fly. More to come later!