Night flying

So I have had the Phantom for a week now and I've been gaining confidence flying it every day pretty much. This weekend I was visiting friends near Basingstoke in the UK and I decided to take the P3P (now named CargoBob) with me for a little demonstration. The weather was pretty decent on Saturday so I had a chance to show the thing off a little. 

Surrounded by trees and a large housing development however, it wasn't the best place to do any kind of distance flying - you need visual line of sight (VLOS is the acronym I've learnt this week) for this thing to fly so I was really limited to just small movements over the garden I was in and climbing up high so my mates could see the aerial view of their house on the ipad I had linked up to the controller. 

If you've never seen one of these things fly, it's pretty cool and will almost certainly have you staring with your mouth wide open as this little bug like thing is zipping around, up and down, side to side in front of you. 

At night however, it looks soooooo much better! We took it to another house in the street around 9pm and I did a little flight in the back garden there. You can see the results of this here 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acdSELOf4II

Unfortunately I forgot to have the camera on the quad rolling at the same time so you only get the outside perspective but you can easily see how quickly it will climb and fly around in an open space. It''s amazing! 

I'm sure the novelty of taking the Phantom over people's houses will wear off soon enough, I'm just trying to get as much flying time in as possible at the moment to feel confident with the controls. I've only just managed to chalk up an hour in the last week because you're supposed to take it easy with the batteries while they are brand new. Next week I think I should be able to do some longer flights though, weather permitting. 

The first trip out with CargoBob is planned for 2 weeks time when we're heading off to the Gower in South Wales with some friends - so I am hoping for some good opportunities to film us all by the sea.