DJI O4 Air Unit Pro First Flight – CRASHED & BROKE IT!

Guys, I’m really excited – this is my very first flight with the DJI O4 Air Unit Pro version, and I realized this might not be the best place to check it out because this thing is quite steep. If I have to retrieve the drone – this doesn’t have GPS – and also it’s super steep, so if something happens, I’m really screwed. I’m not really sure why I picked this place for my very first flight, but I love risking it sometimes. So let’s check it out, let’s set up the drone, put a battery on it, and start flying. Let’s go!

First Impressions

Now I need to be careful about these power lines. One thing I need to say straight away is how smooth everything looks. I might feel some vibrations from the frame, which I’ll have to check if they appear in the video because that would be a problem since we only have this camera. Check out this wind – it’s blowing quite strongly from the left side of the drone, so I need to be careful with that. 60 megabits, wow, that’s great! That’s just like flying the V2. Oh, the wind is so strong here – the drone almost doesn’t move. You can see it’s like staying in one place. The signal though is so, so smooth.

I need to be careful here because I’m going to lose visual line of sight if I go behind those rocks too much. Oh, I love that! Let’s just not go all the way down because I don’t want to waste my battery just climbing up with this ridiculous wind here.

The angle of my camera is quite high, and still, I’m having a lot of problems just going forward because of that wind. But this rock here, it’s called the Pierced Rock because we have a… wow, the wind is really strong. Not sure if you guys are able to see it in the footage, but here it’s quite cold and also super strong. But I’m enjoying the quality, it’s just very smooth. It’s not… okay, now it’s a lot less than 60 megabits, but you get the point.

The Incident

Let’s do a small dive here, let’s just set it up… Oh, that was nice! I heard a strange noise – I think I might have clipped one of the antennas maybe on the props, not too sure. I’ll have to check.

But wow, this is so crystal clear! The feed inside your goggles is just spectacular. One thing you have to just give to DJI is just how immersive everything looks when you’re flying FPV. You are inside the goggles, you really feel like you’re flying, and the closer you get, the more exciting it gets for you. Oh, I’m loving it! Whoa… okay, I definitely feel some strange noise, and I almost did what I was thinking that I should be super careful not to do.

That was so, so, so close! Oh my God, I need to examine if all antennas and everything are fine because I’m hearing some weird noises. So let’s just land and see what’s going on.

Just like I thought – maybe the antenna… a little bit… maybe you will see it’s not properly fastened, so at some point it’s just dangling. Yeah, that’s the problem. I need to fasten it in another way, but just my frame is not, you know, super well configured for this new air unit. I don’t have any 3D prints for it, I don’t have anything yet because it’s that new. So we’ll see about that, but it’s not a problem. First flight was a success!

The Temptation

Now it’s time to just explore more and do more with this brand new Air Unit O4 Pro. It kind of sucks because I really want to go through the rock here, the Pierced Rock, and I’ve done it before many times, but the wind is super strong. I’m feeling like this would be a huge risk – if something happens and the wind blows it in the last minute because of that turbulence that you get from going through the rock, if something happens, I will have to go all the way up here. I’m just not sure I want to risk it that much for a shot that I’ve already recorded previously. So I think I will be wiser today and just focus on getting more shots and trying out the Air Unit Pro in more locations instead of risking it for a shot that I already have. You’ve seen it on my channel already, so hope you guys are okay with that. Let’s continue with more flying.

The Decision

A wise man would probably listen to himself, let this go, let it slide, and just go and record more footage that you can actually share and use for your channel. Unfortunately though, I’m not wise. Not one bit. Because what did I do? I sent it! I saw that the sun is starting to peak through the clouds, the lighting was great, it was the beginning of the golden hour, everything was just super cool looking with this golden glistening on it, and I wanted to get a shot from this Pierced Rock. I wanted to go through the gap.

First try was great, but unfortunately, I’m a perfectionist and I just didn’t like the line. I didn’t like the shot. The goal was not just to go through the Pierced Rock – I wanted to get a nice shot out of it, I wanted to make it exciting. Unfortunately, my shot was not exciting at all. I think it was just very boring, very bland, just going through the rock. This is not what somebody wants to see, right?

The Crash

So I went back, I wanted to repeat the line, make a nice move, and just have a longer flight, longer line that I can position properly, go with a little bit more speed, and just have a nice shot afterwards. However, this didn’t go as planned. As you saw in the intro, I overcompensated a little bit, went a little bit too fast going through the gap, and the wind pushed the drone to the right heavily just as I was getting through that hole. That, of course, resulted in a big crash.

I tried using Turtle mode to flip the drone after the crash and to just try to get out of this sticky situation without having to go manually myself there and rescue the drone, but that didn’t work either because the props were broken. I think the drone flipped one time, but that didn’t help.

The Recovery

Never say “this one last time,” just “one more time.” Don’t say it, don’t say it! Guys, it’s the curse, it’s the FPV curse of the “last time” because check this out – you might be able to see my car, this is where I started. Still a little bit more to go, it’s not a good look, not what I wanted to do this afternoon, but we’ll get it done. It’s still in one piece overall, but not ideal, definitely not ideal. And I broke the antenna of the air unit unfortunately. Damn it! And my car is all the way down there.

It is such a big difference between how you feel the wind down here at ground level and how it actually is up there. Here it’s so peaceful, it’s quiet, it’s nice, it’s relaxed. You are feeling like you have a lot of confidence, you will get the shot no matter what, it’s no problem. But as soon as you get to that high point where there’s really nothing that stops the wind, it gets so much different, and that strong wind really was the difference.

This is it guys, this is part of the experience, what you can expect when it comes to FPV. I’m sure many of you are aware and are familiar with these types of crashes because it’s normal. It just sucks to happen that early when I’m still figuring out the O4 Air Unit Pro for some of my first flights, and I couldn’t really enjoy it before I crashed it.

Final Thoughts

Why am I even making this video? Obviously, I want to share something interesting that happened while I was testing the O4 Pro. Also, I think it’s interesting to share our fails because it was so easy to put this in the bin, to never say anything about that, to never mention it on my channel. But I know pretty much every single FPV pilot has been through that, and it’s refreshing to see that everyone makes mistakes. It’s great to be able to laugh at yourself, I think, and that’s the reason why I wanted to share that.

Obviously, I got the drone back, everything is back to normal. I managed to save it, I rebuilt it a little bit – mostly the antennas were the big problem with the O4. I’m happy to say that the O3 Air Unit antennas also work on the O4 Pro – that’s something that some of you might find very useful in case you damage your O4 Pro antennas as well, just like me.

Now the drone is back in action. I was able to fly more after that in the days after that, and everything is working properly. No motors were broken, no damage on the ESC and the flight controller – nothing was really that broken besides the props and the antennas of the O4 Pro. So it was a great experience generally. Looking back at the footage, it’s funny to me – obviously at the time it was not funny at all, but I still think it’s a nice, interesting experience that I wanted to share with you guys.

Hopefully you enjoyed it! If you did, you know what to do – blow up the like button, subscribe if you want to see more O4 Pro videos coming on the channel, and also some more spicy things around the corner as well. This is Mike from 无人机至尊 – take care, have fun, fly a lot, and I’ll see you very soon in my next one. Ciao!