DJI MAVIC AIR

There’s one important reason to buy the DJI’S latest addition to the Mavic family and that’s three-direction object detection. The Flight-autonomy 2.0 is great, but all those pre-programmed shooting modes are pretty useless when you get your terrain elevations wrong and crash a drone into a sand dune.

On the physics-defying side the Mavic Air lifts its 430 g on four rotors for 21 minutes of flight time on a 3S, 2 375 mah lithium-ion cobalt battery. This chemistry is a first for the company, which has generally stuck to Li-po up until now. The three-direction object detection mentioned earlier is powered by two cameras fore and aft, and two cameras below. There’s also an infrared sensor alongside the video camera to power the smart flight pattern obstacle avoidance features.

On the topic of the video camera, the three axis gimbal is a new design that resembles the dual axis Spark unit. On the inside, however, is an all-new vibration damper design to further enhance the buttery footage DJI has become known for. Flight mechanics now include a 68 km/h top speed, but there is no user selectable ATT mode, a huge disappointment for all the skilled pilots out there. It seems the Shenzen company is betting the farm on its new real-time environmental response features (Flightautonomy 2.0). This new system uses sensor data to keep constant track of the craft’s position, a boon for those times it loses GPS, like when flying indoors. Visual positioning range is now up to 30 m and there’s 3D map building, which assembles data from all seven cameras and IR sensor. Advanced Pilot Assistance System (APAS) is the star of the show and it enables the craft to navigate round an obstacle instead of coming to a halt – this is DJI’S riff on Intel’s Realsense tech. We’re most excited about the multiple redundancies built in to intelligently switch to other sensors should a failure occur. These redundancies are important for possible bugs in the craft’s all-new controller. You connect your phone via cable, like the Mavic Pro, and the controller connects via “enhanced” Wi-fi and 2,4 and 5,8 GHZ which is good for 720p relay at up to 4 km. Latency is up from its bigger sibling.

Finally, Mavic Air also brings the Inspire 2 and Phantom 4 return to home features to lesser DJIS; that’s the trick where the drone will follow its route back to where it took off. That alone makes this a giant leap for the average consumer. Combine all that tech with the excellent 12 MP camera sensor capable of 2160p at 30 frames per second and 100 MB/S (a jump from the Mavic Pro’s 60 MB/S), this translates to 60 fps 2,7K and 120 fps 1080p, and DJI has once again become its own biggest competition, blowing its own best selling products out the water. Oh, and let’s not forget the party piece 32 MP spherical panoramas because all the processing is done on the craft, and the 8GB of internal storage. Incredible.