Flying a drone in high winds
It took me 11 months to figure this out, but this past week, I finally came face to face with the dangers of flying my Mavic Pro in high winds. If you own any DJI drone, you'll know that while flying, the app will warn you of high winds and ask you to take caution when flying. I've flown my drone in high winds before at all sorts of altitudes and never had an issue until this week when I was flying off the coast of Kahala in Hawaii and found that my top drone speed was making my drone go backwards when flying upwind.
The video below explains it quite clearly.
Maximum drone speed is always relative to wind speed.
Thank goodness I didn't lose my drone. But now I will heed those wind speed warnings a little differently.
Inside Western Engineering's WindEEE Dome where drones are stress tested
Ok, I swear there's something interesting to see in this video despite the lackluster host. Motherboard takes us into Western WindEEE Research Institute to show us how some drones are being stress tested to withstand heavy and unpredictable winds.
The WindEEE Dome isn't just for testing drones of course. It's main purpose is to study wind formations in order to better predict and understand how storms work and affect us. Pretty cool to see when the smoke machine is turned on.
Anyway, since that video sucked so much, here are some more videos of the WindEEE Dome.
See how the wind moves around the world
THIS IS COOL! See a map of wind directions all over the world! That's all! It's just wind! But a really cool way to see wind! WIND WIND WIND.