So this is the latest drone here from DJI it's called the Mavic Air and it's
really a cross between their cheapest version the small portable DJI spark
that I reviewed and then of course we have the Mavic Pro I reviewed that
one as well recently and it combines best features out of those two drones
they're into this one drone so it's got the foldable design the foldable arms
here like the Mavic and then it has the 3 axis gimbal like the Maverick Pro
and but the flight time isn't quite as good as that one there so this gets
around well they claim 21 minutes of flight time but I've only been able to
get about 1516 minutes it depends on how far you want to really push that battery
remaining battery percent before you decide to hit the return home button on
this thing here so it has now cameras in the rear which is one of the changes so
it now can see and sense collision and occlusion avoidance for the rear cameras
it's got these sensors on the bottom as well there too just like the Mavic
has for auto hover things so it's their most advanced drone yet it's got a
couple more new shot modes that you can do with it through the controls and the
bit rate on the camera so it does 4k 30 frames per second at 100 megabits per
second so that's up from the 60 on the Maverick Pro and to me the video quality
actually looks a little bit better here on the Mavic Air so let's check this
out well have a look and see what we get in the box we'll go for the first flight
and then my overall final opinion at the end of this video on whether or not you
should actually get this maverick air here so let's take a look and see what
we get inside the box now this is just the normal version so it's not the one
that has the extra battery packs you can get the fly more combo or has all that
now if you're picking one of these up make sure you've got the seal on it here
you can see that box is sealed too no one has tampered with us so here we have
the drone in the top and you can see it is really quite small it comes with this
case which is really good because the Maverick doesn't actually come with a
case at all you could use the box with the spark but it is a very nice case you
have a look at the drone just how small this folds up inside there you can see
look at that that is really really tiny so it's not quite as small as the spark
but because it folds up it actually really is almost as small but it
combination really off the Mavic and the spark was just an in-between model
then any other box we have here we've got some propeller guards we have some
spare props as well intructured manual warranty card and whatnot and just a DJi
card there too, then our controller which looks a lot like the mavic air's
controller but it doesn't have a screen on it and in the final box we have the
charger of course we need to charge the battery up and we got to to control the
sticks therefore the controller you need to screw those on otherwise it will not
be able to control it type C cable have adapt is there for the mobiles and then
the power cable right here so these just simply screw in like so so very easy to
do that and then it takes a few seconds just to point out as well that the
charger does have two USB to ports on there for charging so you can charge up
the controller with it of course and then charge up say your mobile phone
that you're going to use in conjunction with their controller now since I'm
always one to weigh things let's take a look at the weight of things here so the
drone is 437 grams which is not too bad so what about when it's in the case so
with the case then that puts it up to 571 grams add the controller if I can
just balance then on top without it sliding off and it's 851 grams now then
with the power brick on the top of that it's one point zero four kilos so the
battery pack is right here you can see here there is an indicator to tell you
how much level you've got on this but I'll first show you the gimbal so it's
locked in place with this cover on here which is really good so that stops it
from getting damaged so you got the two little tabs you decide you need to pull
this up and I was a little bit puzzled at first when I got this thinking well
how how do I get it off I keep pulling on that but you actually just got to
slide it up and then you have the camera of course there so this is 3 axis gimbal
it's a 12 megapixel camera it's a 3 axis stabilization there and it also records
now up to a hundred megabits per second the bitrate on 4k 30 frames per second
which is great so two front-facing cameras for collision avoidance now note
that there are no cameras on the side of this so it has no side collision
avoidance and there's no camera at the top as well
there so if you're havin to go along and fly up towards a tree or something if
you're underneath it then it could hit it still so you still have to be quite
careful with that on the rear now this is new so two new cameras there that
also have rear collision avoidance now this is just a little LED here and this
flap you'll find the type C port and that's where you install your micro SD
card and down the bottom another two down
with firing sensors that's to use with the auto however the landing and the
downward firing cameras as well to sense exactly where it is so you can see it's
really quite small and compact away this folds up there's our battery there so we
do have a status indicator so each of those LEDs is of course 25% battery so
you can just look at it and when you have it on there you can see straight
away that you've got 75 percent or 75 to 100 percent battery life left on this
and that battery is of course removable but it's facing downwards so if the
battery's not clipped in properly hopefully this won't just drop out which
happened to quite a few spark owners we've had the battery in-flight drop out
of their drone and of course they probably damaged or lost their drone
hopefully this will not happen with the new mother gear so you see they have
labeled clear instructions on this drone for failsafe for people to start out
that decide to pull out words or something now you have to push this down
and that flicks up then the propeller blade and in this one the guide as well
tells you so this goes out so that's how the propellers are out and then this of
course this is the little landing gear here which in fact houses the antenna
for it which is quite clever so this gives it a range of four kilometers
which is not as good as their Maverick Pro but better than the spark at least
now if you didn't happen to have the controller with you and you wanted to
control it with your mobile phone which I honestly don't recommend it's best to
use the controller because you get better range better performance faster
response times as well then you've got the wireless ID here on the side so you
can connect up to the drone wirelessly the Bary takes approximately an hour to
charge and you can see right now it's somewhere between 25% and 50% so I still
have at least 30 40 minutes before so it's going to be fully charged now it is
disappointing that you cannot charge the battery within the drone with the type C
port because I know with the spa you can charge it using a
mobile charger for example or a car charger so before I can get started
there is a firmware update for the drone and there also was one for the
controller now you kind of have to do this I don't think you can fly it
without updating the fermion I don't see why you would want to either because it
could fix some potentially bad bugs so maybe you can have this drone dropping
out of the sky not that that's probably the case but you should always of course
update the firmware ok so here we go first flight well it's actually not my
first flight this is my third attempt here because I ran into problems didn't
actually record the first time so beautiful day here in Denya takeoff
alright so I'm gonna do a manual takeoff there let me head straight out to that
tower there like my DJI Maverick review
the iron tower 17th century coastal defense and there's normally a little
bit of wind around at the moment is a tiny little breeze but actually flew
this yesterday and high winds and it handled it pretty well ok so just gonna
bring the game ball down give you a good look at the tower
okay so there we go and I have a look at the roof of it hopefully this is not
overexposing it's hard to see look down now at the roof so it still has a roof
in this even though it's quite a few hundred years old and it's bring that
gimbal back up and I'm going to pan around now
nice view there over the coast so I still have the drone and visuals it's a
little dot I can see right out there very clear day today so that's women to
pan around show you town unfortunately then the orchards there are burning at
the moment so there's a little bit of haze and smoke around but it's not too
bad around here you guys have a nice view of the town there to the right of
the screen there that two last rotors and hitting straight ahead you'll
actually see the castle it's kind of hard to make out because it's quite far
away there so bring the drone back to me now got to keep an eye on that battery
life at all time so that's 15 satellites there try and pan around really slow
here and the terraces you can see along this part here and their mountain range
there just give you a view of that that is the Mongo the mountains called
they're bringing it back around 2.2 woods towards where I am here and
another look at that tower before I head back and just a few of the cows deer
because this is probably the most beautiful part of dinner that's right
here that coast they're really nice-looking look at that view such a
good day today stunning ok so it's gonna bring it
around now nice and easy does it you can use the cinematic mode so if I can get
actually a closer look at that tower that's what really interests me should
be just below me Navy guy says move the drone now and
have a closer look at that Tower
now what if I can do that waypoint feature now you've got these different
modes in here just bring the gimbal up a little bit again and you can do some
tricks with the sticks as well like if you get used to it you can pull both the
sticks in words if you're really good pilot and it got little bit experience
and you can actually go and do this many to go around it yourself
see what I'm doing now now I need a little bit of practice at this but I'm
trying to get a a bit more of a view of this tower but if you do it like this
very slowly and carefully ever look you can see there's like a door there at the
front of the tower it's good that there was no one else around here normally
there are a lot of hikers around more of a day like this
today it's actually looks like there could actually be a couple of hikers out
there today such a beautiful day for it
and I'm going to pan around a little you know a couple of people out there
I'm keeping well away from them let's bring that around again and just tweak
that gimbal out there so look at that view
as I mentioned if you see those mountains in the distance it's a little
bit hazy there at the moment a great view they're off the coast so I'm going
to bring it back now towards me and actually want to test out that sport
mode because that is the extra fast performance months I'm just going to do
a little of a flyover here and head back towards where I am so flick the switch
hear that little beep as confirmation and here we go to gain a little bit of
altitude
and fully hit on the stick now so I'm over towards this direction here I can
really hear that picking up now so look at the speed sixty-seven almost it's
really moving great performance
so for those of you wanting to know how much does it blow around and light winds
you can see it is moving around a little bit
now I'm not touching the controls at all on low battery so that's what that
annoying beef is that's gonna come in I'm gonna have to land it soon or we'll
do it automatically probably once the better gets lower you can see it does
get blown around quite a bit I once I would not be flying this alright so this
is a great little drone here I really love it so it's got the best of the
spark the smaller more compact designed to it but the foldability like their
maverick and they 3 axis gimbal and the 4k footage now the 4k footage I find to
actually be better than the Maverick Pro at times because when you pan around it
doesn't do that little kind of micro stutters that you sometimes see on the
pro it also has that higher encoding rate so 100 megabits per second versus
the 60 and I noticed that with the Maverick Pro though if you've seen my
review of that one the Pro platinum that it does overexpose at times then you
need to really tweak down the exposure to get the best results but here with
this one you don't need to do that so fly ability it is very easy to fly
but got the collision avoidance that you can actually have that enabled at all
time so if it to take something it'll stop and will stop you're flying into
things when you've got that on which is great and then for more experienced
pilots out there then you can flick on the the sports mode and fly it around
quite aggressively and it does really move when you use that it really picks
up and accelerates up to 68 km/h something really moves which is great
now I do have a couple of complaints with some things that one of them is the
firmware update system is an absolute nightmare it's a mess and really did
stress me out because I had a perfect day to fly this and I just wanted to get
out and fly and he knew I had to do the firmware update so I thought okay I set
aside 20 minutes to do the firmware update
we charge batteries on both okay downloading the update it's updating
stuck at 30% and it's sat there for 20 minutes or 30 minutes it drained the
batteries right down I unplug the controller plugged it back here and then
it got stuck at 99% and it kept looping on the control of the whole goddamn time
and I got so frustrated and angry with this I was about to throw this out the
window because it wasn't such a nice day and we've had bad weather for the last
couple of weeks and all I want to do is get to review of this done in time so
it's not late but the system is buggy so whatever you do do not update using the
controller use the PC or Mac application which is called DJ assistant - and I did
that and then it worked absolutely flawlessly so they've got some bugs they
need to iron out because I thought I'd brick this and it was you know a little
bit stressful because the price of this you just think ah you know I have to go
through DJ care and everything I've got to get a new drone oh you have to send
me a new one what a nightmare but luckily that did
not happen to me the other thing is it's got a type C port on here which is great
but why not let us charge with it as well just like the spark now the spark
in between different flights and things that I was doing I actually had it in my
car charging which was great with my car charger and I could top up the battery
so I'll be back at 100 cent and start recording again if you decided to really
go lightweight you didn't want to take the charger with you or extra batteries
then you could plug on your mobile phone charger and charge it if they only
enable that now it's probably their marketing team wants to sell batteries
so that's why they don't do that they want you to have three or four batteries
and then you can just keep flying now the flight time is only really about 17
minutes which is quite annoying really because they claim you can get up to 21
minutes and that's probably if you just did it hover for 21 minutes and don't
record 4k then yes that might actually be possible but real world use flight
time it's okay you probably go and get the maverick pro if you want more flight
time and the spark really frustrated me because that's honestly only about 19
minutes and it's just not enough this is borderline 15 16 17 so really I feel
they could have added 50 grams more of weight made it a little bit wider or a
little bit longer give us
five minutes more flight time twenty minutes of real world flight time would
have been perfect on this but otherwise this is a really good drone loving it
now it is expensive now if you want a cheaper alternative if you worried about
crashing it or something like that make sure you check out my review of Shelby's
me drone 4k there there's a fantastic drone for the price it's got Auto hover
mode GPS is easy to fly but it does not have the collision avoidance like this
one and then my review of the Mavic Air platinum there as well thank you so much
for watching this review of the Mavic air and I do have to see you back in the
channel soon bye for now