Written by Michael Karp
Small drones are some of the funnest to fly.
You can do acrobatic maneuvers, fly at fast speeds, and fly them indoors.
But flying indoors comes with it’s own set of quirks.
In this article, I’m going to give you seven tips for flying a small drone indoors. These tips will help you stay safe and maximize the amount of fun you have at the same.
Let’s get started!
Note: If you haven’t bought one yet, check out this list of cheap mini drones for sale (they range from $9-$81).
1) Find An Area With Lots of Space
First, find an area with lots of space to fly. Living rooms or bedrooms tend to work well.
When flying indoors, no matter what, you usually have a small space to work with. Find the “biggest” small space you can in order to fly.
Especially if you are a beginner drone flyer, it’s smart to fly in the maximum amount of space possible.
2) Remove Potentially Dangerous Items
Next, remove any potentially dangerous items from the area. This includes any items that:
- Can damage your aircraft
- You can damage with your aircraft
- Could potentially break and send objects sailing in the air
Most items won’t fall under the third bullet, but the first two are 100% possible.
Remove as many items as possible that have a hard exterior, because crashing into these can damage your drone (or break it completely). Then remove any delicate items that you don’t want damaged by your drone.
It is almost inevitable that you will crash into something. Make sure to minimize the amount of damage you will do with these crashes.
3) Start Off Slowly
When starting any flight, start off slowly.
By this, I mean gently increase the throttle to get the propellors spinning. Then gently increase it further until you’re at a hover.
If you’re not comfortable flying a drone just yet, practice hovering and landing in one spot. Do this until you’re comfortable with your drone’s throttle sensitivity.
Once you’re comfortable with that, practice your directional controls (yaw, pitch, and roll). Again, when engaging a control, do it slowly and gently until you know how it will respond to stronger movements.
4) Gain a Full Understanding of Your Drone’s Control Sensitivity
Once you have a basic understanding of how your drone will react to different degrees of engagement, it’s time to gain a full understanding of its control sensitivity.
Start pushing its limits a little bit. Push it hard in one direction, notice how it reacts, and then pull it hard in the opposite direction to bring it back to a hover.
As you continue doing this, you will learn just how hard you can push it within the limited space you’re given.
5) Practice Landing on Different Objects
This is one of my favorite skills to practice indoors.
Pick a few “landable” objects around you. This could be a table, a chair, a couch, the counter — anything with a nice, horizontal surface to land on.
Then try flying from one to the other, landing and taking off from each one.
This exercise will help build your landing accuracy, flight control, and throttle control.
6) Be Aware of the Other People Inside
As you’re flying around indoors, make sure you are aware of the other people inside.
Know how many people there are and where they are (in general). You don’t want someone randomly walking into the room you’re flying in and accidentally getting hit by the drone.
Better yet, warn everyone that you’re flying in a specific room and to make sure they enter cautiously, or not at all.
7) Keep Replacement Props Handy
Finally, no matter how good you are, flying indoors naturally leads to crashes — minor and major.
Even a minor crash can result in broken propellors, so it’s smart to keep a few replacement sets around just in case.
That way you don’t have to waste time heading to the store or waiting for a package to arrive. You can just switch them out and be on your way again.
Over to You
Flying indoors can be super fun. And if the weather isn’t behaving, it’s sometimes your only option to get some flight time in.
If you follow these tips, you should be able to have fun and stay safe at the same time.