Lucidity
UFO Pilot
By the end of AMA Expo, we were fast friends with Darryl and his crew from Action Drone USA. Our gracious sponsors, Rick and Beth from GoProfessional Cases, invited us to dinner along with them and some other friends and supporters. That meal lasted three-and-a-half hours and, by the end of it, I was so hoarse from laughing and talking that I had trouble summoning up my voice for the interviews we did the following day – including this one.
Among the activities that strained my voice so severely was shouting “West Coast Drones!” with all of my new friends while we each us held up our own distinct variation of an absurdly overwrought gang sign... Maybe you had to be there, but it seemed hilarious at the time.
As it turns out, the team from Action Drone are big Roswell Flight Test Crew fans. Darryl even credited us with teaching him about multirotor fundamentals (via our YouTube channel). That was humbling given how far they have come in building a business around this technology, and everything I believe they will achieve in the future.
Like many of the other entrepreneurs we met at Expo – interviews to come, stay tuned – I was really impressed with the care and the ingenuity that these guys put into their products. The smallest details had been carefully considered, tested and re-designed to create a refined product: the sort of thing I would like to think that we would build for ourselves, if we had the time and resources available.
Small, but cool, features aside, the two things which stood out to me about the AD1 were:
First, its front-mounted, three-axis gimbal. Techinstein has been talking to me for years about the virtue of a forward mounted gimbal – although most designs (including all of our own) rely on a camera that is slung underneath the aircraft to keep the propellers and forward limbs out of view.
Second, the fact that its limbs fold back, making the aircraft so compact you can carry it in a backpack. There are a lot of advantages to larger multirotors with longer limbs, but as Techinstein and I have found, those advantages are of limited value if the aircraft is so large or unwieldy that you have trouble getting it to the mission site.
Before we parted company, Darryl said he would send us one of his aircraft for a full review, so be watching for that over on our YouTube channel. I'm really looking forward to testing it out and, provided it fulfills our high expectations, maintaining it as a new member of our fleet.