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First Flights

The sim taught your thumbs; this page is about everything the sim couldn't teach — sites, batteries, crashes, nerves and law. It assumes a BNF whoop or your first 5″; if the aircraft is one you built, run the pre-maiden checklist first.

🟢 Start — the shape of a first session:

  1. Pick the site like it's a legal question, because it is. A whoop flies indoors or over a garden. A 650 g 5″ is an A3-category aircraft in the EU: 150 m from residential/commercial/industrial/recreational areas, no uninvolved people, VLOS via a spotter — Module 13 walks the exact decision tree, and it's your registration number on the frame.
  2. Wind is a skill multiplier you don't want yet. First real flights: under ~10 km/h. The sim's calm-air habits need one session of grace.
  3. One goal per pack. Pack 1: hover and gentle drift, nothing else. Pack 2: Tier-1 drills, outdoors edition. Boredom here is cheap insurance.
  4. Fly the voltage, not the clock. OSD voltage is the truth: land at 3.5 V/cell (Battery). Set the OSD warning before the first arm, not after the first scare.

🟡 Hands-on — the disciplines that save gear:

  • The crash reflex: DISARM. Immediately. A crashed quad still armed is a blender waiting for a hand, and props screaming against the ground cook motors and ESCs in seconds. Disarm first, walk over second. Then inspect before re-arming — turtle mode is for flipping a healthy quad, not a cracked one.
  • The pre-arm ritual, every pack, 20 seconds: props tight and correct way round → antennas clear → spotter briefed → area clear → announce, arm at your feet, listen for one weird sound before you climb.
  • Finding a downed quad: note the heading you last flew; your goggles' DVR last frame shows what the quad saw on the way down (Goggles); the buzzer earns its 3 grams now. Walk the line, don't wander.
  • Post-session: packs to storage voltage, quick airframe once-over (props, arms, solder strain points), and a one-line log — what you flew, what broke, what felt wrong. Future-you tuning with Module 9 will thank you.
The first flight after any crash is a test flight

Hover it at head height for ten seconds and listen before you fly away. A bent prop announces itself instantly (Module 9's spectrogram shows why); a cracked arm announces itself later, at speed, over the one spot you can't retrieve from.

🔴 Advanced — graduating. You're past "first flights" when the pre-arm ritual is automatic, you've retrieved a quad by DVR at least once, and you're bored enough to want Tier 2 drills — or your own build. From here the loop becomes fly → log → read the blackbox → adjust (Module 9) — which is the actual hobby.

Where this connects