Torture Testing The DJI Avata 2 on a Construction Site

All right, so today I figured I’d bring you guys along with me on a job that I’m doing right now. I’m down at Penn’s Landing in Philadelphia and this is going to be a multi-year project. Right now, we’re in the demolition phase and by the end,d it’s going to be a nice new park. This is the I-95 cap project. I’ll put some renderings up on the screen of what the finished result is going to be.

So down here in South Philly we’re going to get a brand new park space that goes over I-95 North and South and connects over to the Penn’s Landing area. I actually came for the demolition of the caps that they already had over I-95. They must have had over a dozen machines tearing down all of the old cement. It really was a cool thing to see. I got some awesome photos, some awesome videos, and of course some awesome hyperlapses of that entire process.

Demolition of Penn’s Landing Amphitheater

Now they’re doing demolition of the Penn’s Landing Amphitheater. I actually didn’t even know that this was here. For as long as I’ve lived in Philly, I’ve never seen it, I’ve never been here, I’ve never used it, but they’re tearing it down to make way for this brand new park.

The reason I’m here is because I’m working with the contractor to document this job from start to finish. As I showed, we were here for the first demolition of those caps. Now we’re here for the demolition of the amphitheater and from here we’re going to continue to visit until this project is done to show it from start to finish.

I thought while they’re in the middle of demolition here of the amphitheater, why don’t we do an FPV fly through with the Avata? I think it’s going to be cool to fly around the entire job and show everything they’ve done almost in one take, and the DJI Avata 2 is the perfect drone for it. Now if you saw in my first flight video, we actually did a flight around another construction site that was out in K’ja-hawen. As you can tell, these are probably some of my favorite spots to fly from.

The Job Site

Okay, so let me give you a quick lay of the land. This here is the amphitheater. As you can see, they’re tearing up all of the area down here, like all of the stands. They have the actual stage down there towards the water. This is kind of like the parking lot area. This is the staging area for all of the equipment and then of course we have I-95 there and Philly way off in the distance.

What’s nice about this is we’re going to be able to fly around this area without having to be near people, without having to be near cars. So this is like our entire playground today. It’s also Sunday, so of course we have no workers. It’s going to be nice and wide open.

The one thing we do have to worry about is on the other side of the fence here there is an active walking path. So we’ve got some people walking down there, we’ll of course be conscious of that, but why don’t we just go and buzz around?

I do want to show you here, just underneath the area there seems to be, I guess, the under section of the stands, maybe where they stored stuff. So all of this is open as well. This will be fun to fly through. And yeah, of course we’ll kind of use these machines to our advantage too – have some fun and go and like fly right underneath of them. This is like the perfect playground.

Flying the Avata

I realized I’m in normal mode right now. I thought that I was in sport mode. But yeah, that’s the great thing about the Avata – you can go buzz around, check out, get a lay of the land, and then from there flip in manual and do your thing, which is what we’ll do now.

So we’ll go ahead, put in manual. I think I’m going to use a gimbal pitch of about 18°. We do have some wind here today that we’ll be fighting through, so we’ll see how that goes, but let’s go and rip on around.

Now I will say that I have not been down towards here, Penn’s Landing. I’m not going to say that it’s kind of like the pits. It’s been a nice area, it’s cool to kind of go and hang out with family and friends, but after this revitalization I think that it’s going to be a nice place to go and bring your family. It’s just kind of been an area that’s long in the tooth. So being able to kind of see it get torn down and giving it new life is nice.

Documenting the Work

So again, my main goal here is I want to put together a video showcasing kind of like the work that’s been done right now. And of course this is all going to go into like one final video that shows what it looked like before, during, and after the construction.

Now I will say, I was here the other day with the Avata tearing around kind of getting a lay of the land and the wind was way way less then. We’re dealing with a little bit more wind. I actually had a slightly lower gimbal pitch. I think it was at 13° yesterday. We’re going to try to do that today as well because I think that just kind of flying low and close to some of the different areas is probably going to be our best bet rather than fly with a high gimbal pitch.

My goal here is to start up high here, we’re going to spin around, show off the entire project with like one frame here. There’s nobody down on the walking path now, so we can go ahead and dive downwards.

Fighting the Wind

And this wind today is tough, especially being down here in the water is where you really started to get it. I’d love to try to go right underneath there. Should we go for it right now? Yeah, we’ll do it. It was… I always try to go for something and then pull back at the very last minute.

Another thing we have to understand is today being a Sunday, this whole area is actually locked off with all the gates. So it’s going to be difficult to try to get my drone if it crashed. Yesterday I beat this thing up while I was out here. Man, this wind is insane.

All right, let’s push up this gimbal pitch a little bit so we can get cooking faster, about 17° should be good. Whoop! Oh no, it says “device disconnected”. I ran right into that pipe. Okay, rescue mission time.

Retrieving the Crashed Drone

All right, so I was able to make it in here. I’m standing here on the rubble and debris and this is one of the things that really worried me about the original Avata – the battery ejecting.

I would have been able to stay over there, I would have been able to just go into turtle mode and then fly the drone back. But of course it disconnected because I think the battery actually came dislodged from the drone. If you remember with my original Avata, I lost it twice while I was going and hiking through the Red Rocks. So I had to hike up miles of mountain to try and find the drone, which I did twice thanks to help from some friends.

But still, in this scenario, it would have been great if the battery didn’t come dislodged, if I was able to just quickly flip into turtle mode and then actually fly the drone back to me.

So let’s climb over the rest of these rocks here. All right, here’s the drone and my suspicions were correct – the battery came dislodged out of the back of it. Here is the battery, fully intact, perfectly fine. Actually looks like the clips are a little bit messed up here, but regardless, the battery did come dislodged which means I had to come all the way over here and actually get the drone.

Taking Another Flight

All right, so despite the battery coming dislodged and making me annoyingly have to go and fetch the drone, it is still in one piece. It’s intact. I’m kind of trying to remember what happened but I think I slammed directly into a metal pole which then probably caused the drone to go flying across the ground. But regardless, having a battery that comes out that quickly no matter how you crash is definitely kind of annoying. But let’s go ahead, we’ll get this drone up in the air and take another flight and try not to crash.

All righty, take number two here. Let’s go ahead, flip on into manual. We’re going to knock our gimbal pitch down to 13° so we can fly a little bit slower and I immediately want to try to fly right back underneath there. This feels a little touchy. Let’s see. All right, let’s give it another go.

All right, something feels a little bit weird and off now that I have… now that I’ve crashed the drone. Let’s see, give it one more go. All right, something feels very strange. And again, so I love the Avata here, being able to flip into normal if you get into any issues, buzz right out and give it another go.

You know, I am very excited to see kind of like what comes of this project once they’re all finished. Philly can use a new park space. This will be nice. There we are.

I think it’s just about getting the courage, getting out of that funk and just being able to kind of jump right back into it. I know whenever I crash my drone I always get a little bit gun shy and I feel like especially with the Avata, you need to not get gun shy ’cause the drone is so resilient.

Something just… something just feels off about the drone and I can’t put my finger on what it is. It almost feels like it’s a little bit more sensitive than I’m used to now. All right, now we’re kind of… now I’m feeling a little bit better on the sticks. Let’s try to do some little weaving in and out of these machines.

These old abandoned buildings are just some of the most fun to fly around, being able to not really care if you crash anything. Like if I hit the wall, it’s not like I’m going to feel like I’m breaking something even, ’cause this is about to be torn down anyway.

More Crashes and Issues

Oh, impact detected. You are surely right there, Avata. You know what’s the big issue with this? There is so many little strands of rebar underneath of that area that you’re just kind of flying blind until you see what’s right in front of you. Like look at all this rebar under here. Look, like, what? Oh look, the battery stayed intact. Let’s see… prime the motors, prime the motors… motor starting, motor stalled. All right, I guess we’ll go on one final retrieval mission.

All right, so I’ve got ESC beeping turned on on the drone. I’ve got a general idea of where it’s at. I know that I tried to kind of pop out over on this side. So if I spin the camera around, it’s like right over there. So I feel like this video has almost just been me trying to crash the Avata.

Quite frankly, I thought that this would have been a much better place to fly in, but I think the rebar and just all of these metal pieces kind of sticking down make it a very tough place to fly FPV because you might be ripping through and at the last second you see that there’s nothing but a bunch of bars in front of you and then you end up crashing your drone.

All right, so I regret to inform you that the front of the Avata has been broken. It looks like I hit it a little too hard and ended up breaking the prop guard there.

Knowing When to Call It

All right, so sometimes you just have to know when to pack it up and go home and after three, four crashes and a broken drone, that was my sign to pack my stuff up, leave, come back here and kind of do a damage assessment.

So my V2 is broken. Yes, I could probably still fly this drone but I’m probably just going to end up getting it fixed. Really the only things that were damaged were like the front of the propeller guard here and then also the actual propeller itself. The propeller can easily be replaced but the propeller guard here is something that maybe if I glued it or maybe if I taped it I could continue to use it.

But honestly, probably just want to get it fixed because I wouldn’t want it to come broken while in midair and have the drone tumble down, especially in a high stick situation where I might be near people or something like that. So again, I wouldn’t TRUST it and I’d want to actually fix this the proper way before I end up using it.

It’s also fairly scuffed up and whatnot, but regardless, this brings us to something that I think a lot of people had questions about with the Avata 2 in the beginning, and really kind of is still the beginning, and that is the repairability of it. Like with this drone, if I break it, if I crash it, what’s going to be my move? What do I need to do?

DJI Care and Repairability

Now I think that DJI Care is actually priced really well on the Avata drone. So you can actually purchase it for a small fee and then from there, when you need a replacement drone, it’s very inexpensive. They give you up to two different replacements. So the Avata 2 has a really good DJI Care plan.

But other than that, let’s say you’re handy, let’s say you like to tinker with things, let’s say you want to actually make this repair yourself. Well, as of right now, they don’t actually sell the parts for this drone.

So just to give you like a quick breakdown here, if you type in “DJI Avata” under the DJI Store, you’ll find the Avata upper frame that sells for $19. And then you’ll also find the Avata propeller CS. Those sell for $29 and those are like the two outermost pieces of the Avata that you can just easily swap out and fix as you need to. And as you can tell, it’s a very inexpensive fix – propeller guards $30 and upper frame $20. Really that is super easy, super fast to fix, go and get on your way, start flying your drone again.

But with the Avata 2, they don’t sell anything. If you go and if you type in “Avata 2” and scroll down, all they have are the charging hub, they’ve got the refresh plans, they’ve got the different combos, the different batteries, all that stuff. But there’s no actual pieces that you can buy to get this drone fixed, which means as of right now, if you want to actually fix the Avata 2, you’ve got to send it into DJI.

Now I doubt this is going to be a very expensive fix, but it’s just the fact of the matter that I’ve got to send it in. It’s the fact of the matter that I’m going to be without my drone for a period of time. That’s going to be a little bit annoying, which is why I actually went out and bought another one.

Always Have a Backup

Literally on my way home from that shoot, I went to Best Buy, picked up another drone. And for me, I always want to have two of them. So if I’m in a scenario like that where I’m actually on a paid shoot and I have that just that one time where I can make something happen, where I can actually get my footage, I can pull out my second drone and start flying again regardless of what happens with this one. Because as you saw, I pretty much had to pack up and leave because my drone broke.

So what I thought would start out as a fairly fun video turned into what seemed to be a torture test of the Avata 2. And it really did take a beating. In fact, when I visited that site before I actually filmed that video, I got a really nice one take. I kind of accomplished what I wanted to do by flying up high, coming down and kind of touring around the site. So that’s going to be my deliverable to my actual client. It’s about a minute and a half long video.

But before that, when I was getting a lay of the land, I sure did crash my drone. I hit some things with the Avata 2. I banged it around off the machines. I hit off the ground and it really was fine after the fact. I was able to go pick it up, dust it off and start flying again. But it just sucks it this go around on like my fifth or sixth crash, it ended up biting the dust.

So thank you guys so much for watching. Let me know your thoughts on the DJI Avata 2, its durability, and what you think about repairability in the comments below. And as always, I’ll talk to you later. Peace.