Flight characteristics of the Mavic 3 Pro

AlanLichty

AlanLichty

Moderator
I have had far too many things going on to get out and do some flights in with My Mavic 3 Pro beyond sending it up in the air to shoot sunrises and sunsets until this morning. I wandered out by Vancouver Lake where I had lots of open air and decided to do some big wide almost full throttle figure 8's. My old Mavic 3 would carve out a wide sweeping turn almost like you might expect for an agile aerobatics fixed wing aircraft which made the loops nice and smooth.

That isn't what the Mavic 3 Pro did at all. It made a turn so tight (VLOS only) I had trouble determining when it was facing back at me. As I was watching the drone in flight it almost appeared to have stopped (in spite of full throttle with my right thumb) because it had completed the turn and was headed straight back at me when I was expecting a wide left turn. This was a true hairpin turn where the drone had to have decelerated in spite of my throttle position to turn that tight which suggests the drone software is getting a bit literal/intrusive about how we fly. For grins I flew it back towards me to repeat the turn directly overhead of my position and it makes a really interesting "crab turn" in flight that executed a 180º turn within a second or two and the turn was executed within a 15-20' diameter. It was hard to stop at 180º at that rate of turn so modulating the joystick levels for yaw is going to be necessary.

That said if you really have to turn the drone around in a hurry it's quite capable of doing it.....

Hmm...... now I have to adapt to how do I get the flight behavior I want in spite of DJI's efforts to "help".
 
Jameel Hyder

Jameel Hyder

Moderator
Staff member
Interesting - I have never tried that maneuver with the Air 2s. Do you shoot videos with such a flight path?
 
JimFox

JimFox

Moderator
Staff member
That's interesting Alan.

Curious, did the drone tilt while doing it? I was thinking of videos. It would be cool if it could turn without the tilt.
 
AlanLichty

AlanLichty

Moderator
I found some settings that included yaw sensitivity so I did some quick flights this morning to see what effect they had. Spoiler - it does help make for a wider radius on the turns. This is a sequence I made using the original settings that caught my attention yesterday on one of my neighborhood streets. My goal was to use the street as a guide with this pass and do a full 180º turn at full throttle with the street serving as a guide for how wide the turn actually is. Worth noting - there is zero tilt of the camera throughout the turn.


Edit - I just reviewed the Airdata flight logs and from what I can see the drone went from 33mph (Normal mode) down to 2mph in mid turn and then back up to 33mph in just under 6 seconds as it accelerated out of the turn. I never moved my right thumb from full throttle during the procedure.
 
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AlanLichty

AlanLichty

Moderator
Someone on the Mavic Pilots forum asked me to take one of batteries with recently upgraded firmware for the Mavic 3 Pro and fly it in my old Mavic 3 since there are some suggestions they might not be compatible. Once the older Mavic 3 batteries are upgraded they can be swapped back and forth from what I was able to see.

While I had the older drone in the air I tried the turns I described above to confirm that the older Mavic 3 really doesn't do the extra sharp hairpins the 3 Pro can pull off. The Mavic 3 did big wide arcs at wide open throttle and did not do the hairpin skidded turns the Mavic 3 Pro can do. The skidding part is actually visible right as I pulled out of each of the turns in the video above. Not quite sure why DJI included this maneuver with the Mavic 3 Pro but I have to assume someone had a use for it. I have relearned left thumb sensitivity to get the behavior I want out of the M3P as I really don't need that type of flight path myself.
 
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