Do you ever wonder what happens when you run out of fuel in an airplane?
There's a guy who found out the hard way in World War Two when he crashed his airplane
into the ocean, off the coast of Oahu.
There are two ways to explore this wreck, one is with scuba gear, the other is with
an underwater drone.
Today we have this guy, the Gladius, we're going to take it down underwater and see what
happened to the airplane the guy had to abandon.
Let's get started.
[Intro]
[Music playing]
So with this underwater drone, there are a couple different features of it: the camera
here in the center that shoots in 4K.
There's no gimbal, which should be interesting.
I've done a couple test flights with this drone underwater, but nothing as big as this.
So it will be interesting to see how well the camera is controllable and how well I
can point the camera at what I want to see.
There are a couple different propellers.
We got the right and left propellers here at the back that will guide the drone, you
know, left and right.
And then we have these propellers here in the middle which bring the drone up and down.
And a cool thing that I haven't seen on other drones are these front LED – these headlights
– that should allow us to see a little bit better underwater.
One thing that is different about underwater drones is that Wi-Fi and Bluetooth signals
don't travel more than a few feet underwater.
So the whole thing does need to be tethered, and we have this guy right here, a hundred
meter tether, which allows us to take the underwater drone, which is waterproof, about
100 meters down in the water.
And this wreck, the Corsair, is 35 meters, which should allow us plenty of leeway with
this tether.
We have a bunch of these little o-rings right here, so I'm going to pop this tether into
the top of the drone and screw it on tight.
To charge the drone, there's this little tail pipe right here on the back and it just charges
up with a little circular connector.
And then all of the internal memory is inside of the drone.
There's no SD card slot or anything else, and you transfer the files via Wi-Fi.
If there was a removable SD card slot, it's just one more hole to waterproof, so I kind
of like that it's a whole self-contained design and no extra holes for water to get inside
of.
So turning on the drone, we have the one power switch right here, and we have a bunch of
LED indicators inside of the Wi-Fi spool.
Alright, so we have the drone pointed straight at us, and you can turn on the LED lights
right there and then we can see us in the screen.
Alright, let's see how it operates underwater and let's go explore this Corsair.
Tossing it in the water.
Let's go.
[Music playing]
So this propeller powered World War Two airplane called the Corsair lies just a few miles off
the coast of Hawaii.
In 1945, due to a mechanical issue with the fuel gauge, the pilot had to crash land the
plane in the ocean, but luckily still managed to survive.
The plane is also still in one piece, resting with one wing submerged in the sand on the
ocean floor, but the rest of the plane is pretty exposed.
While crashing a plane is usually bad news, it's good news for the fish in the coral.
During the last 70 years while the plane has been on the ocean floor, it's turned into
an underwater oasis for all kinds of ocean life, which makes it even more more fun to
explore and to film.
One thing that I really like about this is that there's a little diagram here in the
corner that tells me what direction the drone is facing, left, right, forward or backward,
as I'm actually flying the drone.
So it makes it easy to tell what direction I'm looking at.
[Music playing]
One thing that people don't think about underwater is that there are a ton of currents, kind
of like how there is a breeze out in the open air.
Underwater has the currents that flow back and forth and they're pulling the drone one
direction or the other constantly.
So that's why you'll see with some of the footage that the drone is tilted sideways
or floating back and forth with the flow of the ocean.
Luckily this drone does have like a little stabilizing feature that I can flip on and
then it keeps the drone kind of hovering in the same position, which is pretty cool.
Most of the flights we had today though, that feature was off and I was controlling it all
manually, making sure that I avoided the pull of the cable on the top which wasn't really
much of an issue because of all the slack we had.
The 100 meter cable was way longer than the 35 meter dive down to the Corsair airplane.
[Music playing]
Woo!
Good job buddy!
So all in all, we've been flying this thing underwater for about 2 hours now, and I'm
down to about 28% battery life, which is pretty phenomenal considering how long we were underwater
looking at that wreck and the turtles and the divers.
One thing that I want to point out is that the drone can go in saltwater or freshwater,
but there is a weight here in the bottom that you need to switch out, so I had the weight
for seawater because this is the ocean.
I've tested out a couple underwater drones and I'm pretty impressed with this one.
My favorite thing about it obviously is the headlights, which is pretty nice underwater.
When you're super deep in the water, there's not enough light, and light is required to
see color.
So when there is light produced by the drone, there is more color underneath the water.
We were pretty deep so I'm not sure how the footage is going to turn out, but you be the
judge, let me know down in the comments what you think.
So I took this underwater for a bit, pulled it back up, took a break and took my air drone
out for a while, and the controllers are very very different.
Like let's say you're looking at an object, the camera is pointed at the object and you
can go left or right and kind of like pan around the object.
The drone you can't do that, it's only a head-on motion.
So what I would like to see, the one improvement I would like to make on this is to keep the
the headlights, keep the waterproofness and everything, but make it so that the drone
can like pan left and right and circle around an object instead of just going forward and
backward and up and down.
It would make for a more cinematic feel to the footage.
[Music playing]
The Gladius drone does come with it's own storage container.
It's got slots for the controller and all of the drones and stuff which is great.
No complaints there.
Huge thanks to Gladius for sending this drone out for me to test.
Overall, it's a pretty fun drone.
I'm not around water very much, so I don't know how often I'll use it.
And aerial drone for me is a little more economical.
But if I had to choose, this one with the headlights, and the 4K, I'm a pretty big fan.
Huge thanks to Steve here for being our scuba diver, and we got Braxton right here, our
on-boat camera man.
And we're here with the Reef Pirates.
They took us out on their boat.
And a huge thumbs up to Gladius from Chasing Innovations.
They've make a fantastic underwater drone.
Hit that subscribe button if you haven't already.
And thanks a ton for watching.
I'll see you around.
[Music playing]