Altair Falcon AHP | Drone with Camera for Beginners | FREE PRIORITY SHIPPING | Live Video 720p, 2 Batteries & Autonomous Hover & Positioning System…

We have had a blast with the Altair Aerial Falcon. And once retrieved from a tree where the Falcon lodged after a sudden unexpected wind gust, we expect to have more!

This Altair Falcon was our first GPS drone and the addition of GPS and auto-return to a drone in this price range is unbelievable. We kept the prop guards on the Falcon, as we are using it for educational uses and it makes a very decent indoor drone for large spaces such as a gym, even without the GPS signal to stabilize it. Videos are decent 720p [edited, oops], though a bit of a fisheye effect as with most small camera drones.

Summary starting with the pros:
+ well made recreational camera drone
+ comes with spare battery and box usable as a case
+ spare parts such as extra “landing gear”, rotors, and screws included
+ rotor blade protector: easily removed, great to have for beginners!
+ basic controller, but works well up to 200+ft
+ easiest pre-flight setup of any GPS enabled drone we have tried
+ clamp to hold smartphone or small tablet works on controller works well even for larger smartphones such as Galaxy Notes 10
+ FlyingSee app is basic, OK, but, see below

Cons:
– return to home is not quite as good as on other more expensive GPS, but it does function
– neither the app FlyingSee nor the remote give indication of remote control battery state
– custom route feature didn’t work well for us
– video is shaky with any wind at all, most still shots are OK
– interface is flaky when trying to capture still photos, we had to stop video, take photo, resume video
– trim didn’t seem to work well
As with all small, light drones when operated with any wind at all, they may fly off anywhere. Can’t hold this against the AA Falcon, just a warning that if you expect flying stability in windy conditions, look to get at least 1/2lb drone!

All in all, for a starter drone this drone works very well, 5 stars! Hoping the few quirks we saw in video/photo controls are fixed with a software update soon.

My first impression is: This is fun!
This might be a bit long because this is new to me.
First, there is a learning curve, no doubt about it.
It comes with two batteries which last 10 minutes each.
I’ve now gone through 3 sessions of 20 minutes.

The first session, I practiced indoors until I thought I understood it.
I took it outside, was having a good time, I let it get too far away from me, and it flew off into the wild blue yonder.
It took me an hour and a half to find it in the desert.
After two sessions outdoors, it’s apparent any kind of breeze makes flying this thing an almost impossible challenge.
I managed to connect my phone through the app, and took some pictures. The resolution is only 720, but it did the job as expected. I’ll try doing movies, but will wait until I get better at flying on a less breezy day.

This thing is fun and might lead me to a more advanced unit someday.
The only thing I don’t like is that the instructions say it takes an hour to charge each battery, but in actuality it’s more like 3 hours, which means it takes 6 hours charge time to fly 20 minutes.
It would be better if they provided 2 charge cables so at least both batteries could be charged at the same time.

But this thing is fun, and built to take some punishment as I crashed it many times, and it hardly shows.