No Matter What the Weather: Tips for Flying Your Drone Whenever You Want
Drone-flying is an outdoors sport, and it’s natural that you’d want to get out there in all kinds of weather. Recent advances have seen all-weather models from the likes of DJI, QuadH2O and Splash, but these are the exception. With most regular drones, you need to keep the weather in mind when you send your craft out into the sky.
When the weather is extra cold
Drone manuals specify operating temperature ranges that you should keep in mind — usually, between 0°C and 40°C. These aren’t one of those obscure specifications that you can safely ignore. Temperature ranges are meant to be taken seriously. Low temperatures can affect the performance of your craft in a number of ways.
Battery performance: Lithium-polymer batteries don’t function well in very cold weather. The app that comes with your drone probably has a battery voltage indicator to help you keep an eye on the health of the battery on the craft. Your battery is likely to drain very quickly. You can prolong your flight times with battery-warmer products like drone sweaters and insulating caps for the battery.
Icing on the rotors: Just as aircraft wings get de-icing sprays before flying out in very cold or snowy weather, your drone’s rotors need treatment, as well. It doesn’t make sense to let your drone fly out in very cold weather if there’s even a little moisture on the rotors or in the air. If there is snow, a drizzle or even a fog, you shouldn’t do it, at all. You could try spraying the rotors with WD-40 to see if it keeps the ice off, however.
Image quality: According to Drone Enthusiast (Dronethusiast drones with cameras guide), image quality tends to suffer in cold weather too. You’re likely to see considerable misting on the lens.
When the sun’s beating down
It’s much easier to see why you should be wary of the heat. On a very hot day, the sun can directly heat up the motors. On top of this, great heat makes the air thinner, which means that the motors on your craft will need to spin faster, generating more heat. If you want to fly your drone out on a hot day, you need to plan for lots of downtime between flights to allow everything to cool down.
Rain is best avoided
It’s intuitive to see that drones shouldn’t be flying out in the rain. Water can get into critical electrical parts and short things out. You’d have a dead drone in no time. If you need to fly in the rain, you need to get an all-weather drone or wait until the rain stops. It’s important to remember that it doesn’t have to actually rain for it to be a risk. Fog and high humidity can be bad, as well.
Flying on a windy day
It can be hard to judge how safe the wind speed is for your drone. You could have a steady, slow breeze going, but have strong gusts coming through every now and then. In general, the rule should be to not fly in wind or in gusts that come close to your craft’s top speed. There isn’t anything much you can do when a 40 mph gust comes up on a steady 20 mph day and dashes your drone into the side of a building. If it’s a windy day, and if you have to fly, the best that you can do is to fly well away from buildings and trees. If you want to know what wind does to a drone, you only need to look on YouTube. There are hundreds of videos that show how bad things can happen to good drones on a gusty day.
Paying attention to the weather conditions can come a lot easier when you realize that a drone is an actual aircraft and not a toy. You’re a pilot, and you need to think of these things.
