![]() I found there was some breakup of the signal when the drone flew further than 250 metres away, and the view looked a little pixellated on the iPhone 7 I was using to test it out, but the wide angle of view provided an impressively clear view of my surroundings, and the display also overlays important telemetry onto that live image, so you know how fast you’re going, how high you’re flying and how much capacity the battery has remaining. The headset fits snugly and securely, and with a strap that stretches across the top of your head as well as a standard stretchy goggles strap, there’s no danger of it coming loose. Once your phone is snugly docked in the headset’s docking tray, you hook it up to the controller via a USB cable, and don the goggles, just as you would with a Samsung Gear VR. What’s more, the Disco is supplied with a smartphone-driven VR headset that streams live 720p video from the nose camera, directly to your eyeballs for the ultimate seat-of-your-pants flying experience. There’s an electronically stabilised 1080p camera in the nose, which produces remarkably smooth footage, recording directly to 32GB of internal storage. Simply flying the Disco is fun enough, but there’s plenty more to it. I think it will take a little more practice to get the Disco to land right at my feet, though. The Disco will then cut the power, reverse its propeller briefly to scrub off speed and glide gently to earth. The idea is to kill the altitude until you can fly no lower – ideally while flying it at yourself – then, when it’s 50m or so away, hit the landing button. Landing is the most tricky thing to pull off, but it’s still very difficult to stack it in spectacular fashion. If you make an error of judgement about direction or altitude at up to 50mph, it doesn’t take too long for things to go wrong, and there’s no forward-collision avoidance as there is with the very best drones. In fact, it’s easier to get to grips with than a quadcopter in my book, although I wouldn’t want to fly one anywhere other than a wide, open expanse of country. The right stick on the control pad is used to bank right and left, gain height and dive, while the left stick is used to accelerate, decelerate and, with a quick flick right or left, enter its “orbital standby mode”. ![]() The most important thing about flying remote-controlled aircraft is responsiveness and reliability, and the Disco meets those demands admirably. Once the drone hits its limits, it will turn around all on its own and head back to base. A downward-facing ultrasonic altimeter and camera work together to prevent you flying it low, and you can set up a basic, circular geofence as well. The Parrot Disco is incredibly responsive and, with its various safety features enabled, you can get stuck in without worrying too much about crashing or losing it. It will continue to circle in “orbital standby mode” indefinitely until you take control and start to steer. You don’t need to do anything at this point in fact, you can simply leave it to circle if you want and make a cup of tea. With the Wi-Fi controller and battery in the drone charged up and powered on, you simply grasp one of the wings by its “shoulder”, press the take-off/land button on the remote with your spare hand and, once the rear-facing propeller fires up to full speed, fling the thing into the air.Īs long as you’re gentle (don’t treat it like a frisbee or it will nosedive dramatically into the dirt), it then takes to the air, rising steeply, and completely automatically, proceeding to fly in autopilot mode at an altitude of 50m in lazy, 60m circles at a speed of 24mph. Take-off has to be the most impressive part of the whole Disco experience. ![]() Parrot Disco: Take-off, flight and landing ![]() The only caveat is that you need a bit more space to fly it in than your average quadcopter, simply because it can go so fast, and it can’t land on a sixpence like quadcopters can. It’s as easy to take off and land it it “hovers” (sort of) and you’ll be flying around with gay abandon in minutes. What’s so exciting about the Disco? Its main appeal is, in fact, that it’s far from tricky to fly it’s just as accessible as any modern quadcopter. Aren’t fixed-wing aircraft incredibly tricky to pilot and amazingly easy to crash? Well, yes, but the Parrot Disco is no ordinary remote-controlled aeroplane, as I found out at an extensive hands-on session Parrot laid on at Kempton Park racecourse down in Surrey. ![]() It was a real turn up for the books, and an exciting development. It announced a new drone – not a quadcopter of the type everyone has been getting so overheated about for the past year or so – but a fixed-wing, single-rotor UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle), the Parrot Disco. Last year, Parrot, eponymous producer of mid- and low-priced drones, did something unusual. ![]()
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