Hi, everyone! Are you going to buy a toy drone this holiday season? If you are, I have a plea: don’t buy crappy drones! And if you do, don’t fly them outside! I was interviewed as an expert today as part of a TV segment that will air next Tuesday. Part of the show involved showing what it’s like to buy and use random, no-name “drones” (toy quadcopters). The reporter was actually not bad as a first-time pilot, especially when tasked with flying toy quadcopters outside, but during an unsupervised moment (I went inside to get something), she flew one of the toy drones too high (about 50 feet up). Immediately, the wind took it out a couple hundred feet from us. I ran outside, took over the controls, and tried to fly it back; unfortunately, we were flying a fairly crappy toy quadcopter designed for indoor use, and it could not overcome the wind. Eventually, the quadcopter descended out of sight; luckily, we were flying over a shrubby hill, and the toy quad was small and light.

(the rest of this article is at my personal website, echeng.com)