DJI Mini Pro 3 - what I learned in my first month

I was super stoked when my DJI Mini Pro 3 arrived.

I had ordered it on pre-order about two months before it released and was counting down the days until it got here. Years prior, the DJI Spark’s unimpressive features had left me feeling uninterested. When I saw a video previewing the new DJI Mini, I knew the times had changed.

Why is the DJI Mini Pro 3 a huge advancement?
- Similar to the Spark, it is amazingly portable. It can fit in cargo short pockets and carried with you anywhere.
- Not only is its size great for portability, but weighing in below 249g, it doesn’t require registration.
- In spite of that size, its camera and gimbal are professional grade. The camera quality is amazing.
- It has the newest version of Active Track, allowing it to track you on the move.
- The new controller is amazing. You no longer need to connect your phone to the controller. If you haven’t owned a drone before that may not seem like a big deal, but it is.

I opened my drone and crashed it twice within 60 seconds.

True story. The truth is, I’m not the most careful person in the world and I definitely push my gear to its limits.
But, through the course of the last month I’ve come to learn some amazing lessons, many the hard way.

Here are the lessons I learned in my first month of ownership of the DJI Mini Pro 3:

Don’t use the auto-launch feature indoors.
This is how I crashed it the first two times. I used the launch button on the controller. This mode prompts the drone to fly straight up and it will fly straight into your ceiling. After I did this the first time, I moved to a room with higher ceilings and it happened again.
If you do fly your drone indoors, do it after you are comfortable flying first and use the manual take off feature. Point both sticks inward and down to start the props and then hold up to lift off.

Be careful in Sport Mode.
One day I was just toying around, flying around the house and decided to try out sport mode and fly fast. What I didn’t realize is that this turns off obstacle avoidance. So I flew really fast, backwards and flew it right into a tree. The drone crashed down from the tree about 20 yards and refused to turn back on. I was heartbroken. We had a big adventure mountain weekend planned for my birthday the next week and I was super excited to shoot some footage. I looked everywhere to see if I could buy a new one or get it repaired before my trip but I had no luck.

Buy the DJI Repair Warranty
When you first register your drone with DJI.com, you’ll be prompted to opt into a 1-3 year extended warranty, where DJI will repair or replace your drone if you crash it. You only have about three days to sign up for this plan. If you wait too long and then try to sign up there will be nothing you can do.

The DJI Warranty-less repair program is actually pretty good!
I sent my drone in for the paid, warranty-less repair program through DJI. I figured with supply chain issues I was going to end up waiting for two months and pay more to repair the drone than it cost to buy a new one. I actually ordered new one and later cancelled it. The repair program was actually really amazing. They sent me a pre-paid shipping label to send the drone off to them and I started getting emails about the status of the repair within a week. I got emails every step of the way, and even though I admitted the drone damage was totally my fault they sent me an exact report of what I had been doing when I crashed my drone and why it crashed (I was slightly embarrassed). After about 2 weeks, and for about $350 I got my completely broken drone that I had crashed 3 times, and would no longer even turn on, completely repaired and sent back to me.

The Fly More Kit is worth the money
At first I didn’t buy the ‘fly more kit’. I had already spent $900 and I didn’t want to spend more until I knew I was going to use this drone. After going through all of my spare propellers in the crashes above, I went ahead and ordered it and I am a huge fan.

The kit comes with 2 of the higher capacity batteries, extra props, the carrying case and the parallel charger that will charge 3 batteries at once. All of these things are quite essential and I can’t recommend it enough.

Don’t forget to take off the gimbal cap
Me and some friends went out boating and I brought my drone along. When we found a flock of dolphins I launched my drone and proceeded to try to get some cool footages of the dolphins splashing, gettin everybody all wet.
But as soon as I was in the air, I went to point the gimbal down and it was stuck. I soon realized I had left the gimbal protector / cap on top and there was nothing I could do until I landed the drone back in the boat and took it off.

Be careful landing on moving surfaces
Moving surfaces, like boats, especially those that are not anchored are very hard to land on. I got the drone back to me on the boat and decided to try to land it on the T-Top on the center console. I had it all lined up and everything looked good, so I held the joysticks to bring it down. Between when I started the landing and when it actually went to touch down, things went south. The boat shifted, I could no longer see the drone which was on the other side of the console and I just hoped for the best.
But the best did not happen. Instead the drone narrowly missed my landing target and instead spun out of control and crashed inside of the boat, flying through one of my friends on the way down.

The propellers don’t hurt THAT bad, but don’t test it
Melissa, who had just gotten a drone prop flying through her arm was so unbelievably chill after her initial scream of terror and went back to watching the dolphins. I checked out her arm and it was red, but luckily there was no blood and looked more like a big of rug burn if anything.
Even after crashing, my drone that has crashed on the deck still spun its propellors almost uncontrollably. I rushed over and grabbed it off of the ground and tried frantically to turn it off. I tried to reach my finger up through the inside of the propeller through a narrow channel to hold the power button to turn it off. That didn’t work and instead the props hit my finger. That happened twice. The great news is that it didn’t cut me or really hurt me at all.

Practice and learn how to catch your drone
Standing with the drone in my hand and propellers spinning wildly I was running out of options in my brain. Should I just want for the battery to die? Somehow I vaguely remembered seeing somewhere that turning the drone upside down will shut it off. I tried that, and Tuhdah- the crisis was over at last!
I’ve learned since the boat day that it is so much safer and easier to just catch your drone than to try to land it on tough targets like that. It is an essential skill to know how to snag your drone out of the sky and turn it off quickly.

Be really careful flying sideways
My next drone crash came a few weeks later. I was at my sister’s barn filming her walk around with her horse and I decided to get a cool sideways fly by of the barn. I was on the other side of the barn and so I couldn’t actually see my drone at this point of time. I flew it sideways and got my shot, assuming and hoping that I was flying over a nice clear field like the one I was standing in.
Even though I knew obstacle avoidance didn’t work when flying sideways, in the moment I found myself pushing those limits a bit farther than I should have.

”Find my drone” mode can be a life saver
I ran around to the side of the barn and couldn’t find the drone anywhere. It was getting dark and my brother in law was waiting in the car. My sister had convinced him that we were just stopping by the barn for 5 minutes and I had promised my 4 year old nephew that we were going to go home and watch Stranger Things before it was passed his bedtime. I was in trouble.
I enabled the find my drone mode on my controller. I had no idea what this mode was going to do so I didn’t know exactly what to look for but I ran around and trying to find a sign. Eventually my older nephew exclaimed he heard a sound and we followed it until one of us looked up and saw the lights blinking from a tree about 60 feet up. It was stuck in the branches.
Me and my sister ran and found a tall ladder, which I used to climb up onto the edge of the roof of the building that stood directly next to this tree and I used that to get into the tree and use my rock climbing / bouldering skills to climb up about another 20 feet. On my way up, one of the branches that I stepped on broke completely and fell onto the ground below, making the way back down a bit more difficult that I’d like.
I did recover the drone though, completely unharmed. It only has a small green mark on the top to show off this small battle scar.

Always keep line of sight
When I flew my drone into that tree not only was I flying sideways without a sensor, I was also flying without line of sight. This is a very big No-No. Not only is it not safe for your drone, it is also unsafe for many other people as well as potential aircraft in the area. It is actually against FAA regulations and the law and you should absolutely never do it.

iMovie on your phone is the shiznit
I got home that night and I sketched up a cool barn video using iMovie. My brother in-law had advised that I look into it when he saw me downloading a super expensive overly complicated movie editing app for my phone.
He was so right! It is so easy to import your clips, trim them, add simple transitions, add text pop-overs, add music and fade-outs. All of the basic stuff you need to make a really good reel, you can do right from iMovie. And with the DJI app paired to your drone you can do this all without needing a computer at all.
Update: I have just recently observed that the DJI App has a video editor built in also. I haven’t actually used it yet, but it looks just as good and maybe even better than iMovie. So give that a look as well.

Get Theta+ to edit 360 panoramas on your phone
360 images are super cool and I love them but I had a hard time figuring out what to do with them at first. I was positioning the images in the DJI app and then screenshot-ing them and importing the screenshot into my videos, but those images were always pixelated compared to the 4k video. Then I discovered Theta+, a free app that allows you to read in 360 photos, distort them and export. Even more cool, it allows you to make videos off of your 360 that animates the motion and distortion through custom paths that you can build very easily in the app. It’s super powerful and awesome!

Get your TRUST certificate
In watching YouTubers, I learned that there is actually a certification that you have to get to fly legally. When I bought my drone I assumed that because of the drone being under the weight limit of 249g, those laws did not apply to me. I have since learned that assumption is very wrong. You have to get a TRUST certificate to fly your drone at all. The good news is that it is super easy. You can do it for free online in about 30 minutes.

Use the B4UFly App
In learning about legally flying my drone, I’ve learned more about different air space in which you can and cannot fly your drone. I assumed that the DJI app had be covered 100%, but this isn’t correct. Just today my buddy, who is a much more experienced drone operator than I, pinged me to let me know to check for flight advisories before I put up my drone. It turns out there is a presidential visit planned for this week and the entire area around Charleston is completely on lock down. It’s easy to see this via the official FAA B4UFly app, but this does not show from within the DJI app on your remote. Make sure you download the app and check it any time before you put up your drone or you could end up violating federal airspace and be in a world of trouble.

And that’s it! A whole lot of lessons learned. Many of them the hard way, but luckily not all of them. Now get out there and fly safe!

If you’re interested in purchasing the DJI Mini 3 Pro, find it here.
The ‘Fly More Kit’ is here.
And the full bundle (recommended) is here.