Altair Aerial AA300 GPS Beginner Drone with Camera | 1080p FPV Video & Photography Remote Control Camera Drone w/ Auto Return Home, RC Drone for Kids & Adults (Lincoln, NE)

Bought this drone as a hobby for me and my son to do together. Being new to drones, I was blown away by what this drone could do courtesy of its GPS features. While some may consider it a "toy drone," it's a very capable unit, and a great place to start if you're an adult looking to get into drones as a hobby. Altair does a really nice job of supporting their product. I've had two interactions with them so far, and came away feeling well-supported both times.Some General Observations:> If you're looking to fly drones outdoors, you going to want GPS functionality, namely, Return to Home, which is part of the AA300 feature set. It's just too easy to have the drone get away from you due to strong winds, piloting it in the wrong direction, etc. Think of the RTH feature as a way to make sure your drone back even if you've totally "screwed up" as a pilot – which you will. The RTH feature is THAT valuable.> Altair doesn't provide guidelines on what kind of wind conditions this AA300 is rated for. I took it out a couple times in 10-12 MPH winds and was able to make it work, but the video quality was very affected as the AA300 doesn't have any kind of image stabilization features. No wind is probably ideal, but this drone can fly with some higher level wind speeds.> You're going to want to buy some extra propellers and at least one extra battery. If you're a beginner, the chances are very good (unless you're flying in a giant prairie somewhere) that you're going to bump into things. Propellers don't like that at all. And if you're going to take it out, you're going to want to maximize your flying time as much as possible – so be sure to pick up at least one extra battery.> I've found some of the features included within the app to be a little "buggy." And the camera/picture features sometimes don't work as intended. My best guess is that if your remote isn't allowing you to start capturing video or take a photo, it's likely because the drone isn't recognizing the SD card. Take it out and put it back in once you've got the controlled and remote turned on and synced up. Also – be sure to STOP the video on the controller in order to ensure your clip gets saved to the SD card. I just turned off the drone at the end of a couple flights and discovered that the drone didn't save the video I had just recorded.> The core piloting features of the drone itself, via the included controller, are rock solid. In my own flying, I found that the maximum altitude was limited to 80m, and that maximum range was about 250m – depending on the specifics of the terrain.PROS:> A great flying drone for the price> Terrific GPS features> Sturdy unit – can take some bumps (but you don't want to abuse it)> Great customer support from AltairCONS:> App-based features are a little clunky/buggy> Video/camera feature on the controller can be a little finicky at times> Flight time is only about 11min (get an extra battery)

First drone I bought. I did some looking around to see if any American made drones were within my price range. I thought I had gotten very lucky in finding Altair aerial, a company based in Lincoln, Nebraska. I was horribly mistake; they don't manufacture the drones, but rather buy them from china and ship from America. Omitting key details like this from the item description is pretty shady and doesn't foster any trust from the get-go.The drone works fine out of the box; pretty quick to learn and intuitive controls. The associated YouTube videos on operating this are short, sweet, to the point and easy to follow. The drone is agile, fast, stands up well against very light wind, and is honestly pretty fun to fly. Neat features like the follow me and circle around me work ok, but with poor video quality are kind of useless. The return to home function did not function how it should with my drone and required me to manually control it to stop from flying up and away from the 'home' location. These are the best qualities of this drone and are objectively most important for a flying rc toy.The Wi-Fi signal, which is necessary to see in real time through the drones camera, is weak, unimpressive, and temperamental, it will disconnect ( and thankfully stay hovering in place while disconnected) when direct line of sight is lost. The app required to use this feature is mentioned further down.The single battery included can take up to 3 hours to charge for 10 minutes of flight, nowhere near the 15 minutes advertised (I'm still very impressed that the battery runs for so long for how light the battery pack is). Beware buying this as a gift for impatient individuals without purchasing a handful of spare batteries along with the drone. The range on this drone appears to be spot on, however with such a finicky Wi-Fi connection, I did not feel comfortable taking this much higher than 100m; the range was generous and more than enough to have fun flying it by just watching without using the first-person camera.The camera quality leaves a great deal to be desired, but I suppose it's what you get in this price range. The app that allows you to access first person view in real time as well as capture video and images has its app permission prompts come up in Chinese while the rest of the interactive portion of the app is in poorly translated English. The app, X-drone, cannot save video at all in my experience and using a micro SD card on the drone ( a port is accessible near the battery) does not improve image/video capture quality beyond what appears to be 720p optimistically, more realistically closer to 240p; it's a very grainy and pixelated quality. Your mileage may vary, but after being misled about country of origin and battery capacity I realized I could spend the same money on a different drone that doesn't try to pass off as an American made product.If company-honesty, battery capacity, and video quality/reliability are non-issues for you, then this is a decent choice at this price point. However, I'd recommend putting the same money towards a drone direct from china, as some of the overseas names do have solid reputations and you know what to expect.

I was nervous about the Altair Aerial AA300. My only experience with a drone before was with a much cheaper helicopter ... which i crashed. But I took the Altair to an open field and found it really easy to handle. Here are some of my thoughts:- First impressions - great packaging, really cool brand, the drone and remote control seem high quality, and the instructions are not Chinese-to-weird-English - they're clear and easy to follow- Getting started flying was easier than I expected. The included instructions were great for this. Just link the drone to the controller, set the compass, and you're off.- I found it easy to get the drone connected to my Android phone. This let's you see through the drone camera on your phone and take pictures. If you can connect to a wifi network, you can do this.- Once I got the drone in the air, i was really impressed by the range. i could take it really high and pretty far away without a lag in the controls or in the remote camera- It's pretty fast! I had it zipping circles around me and was impressed by the speed.- The camera quality is pretty good.- It's also fairly durable. I accidentally crashed it (because I hadn't learned how to land). It was slightly damaged in the crash, but there's no noticeable change in performance. It's a lightweight instrument and i was rough with it .. so that impressed me.My only wish is that the battery lasted longer. But i bet this is because of the need for less weight. I need to see if they sell backup batteries so one can be charging while the other is in use.All-in-all, really cool drone and a lot of fun to fly around. I'm very inexperienced with flying, but I got the hang of it in two flights.