The DJI Air3S: A Test Flight Using Free Panorama Mode

I did a video tutorial a week or so ago covering the importance of reading a manual for whatever hardware and software you use, and how important it was, both the learn about it and second, to probably find new things you maybe were not aware of.

The truth of this hit home today, right between the eyes!

Finally, FINALLY, I have managed to sneak in a quick serious fly of the new Air3S from DJI. I have had this new model for nearly 3 weeks now, but for two of those weeks I was bedridden by the bastard cousin of COVID (where I also lost my voice for 10 days) and for the last week, the typical easterly winds that hit Western Australia at this time of year, conveniently howled down the Darling Scarp at 50kph and more, towards our little hamlet / village, making any thought of a decent flight impossible.

2 Hour Window

Today I was given a 2 hour window. It was still a bit breezy at between 10-15kph, but this was easily manageable by the Air3S with a safety margin, so thought I would have a crack at getting an image using the brand new Free Panorama setting which is unique at this time to this model.

Sure, other DJI models have a panorama setting, but with those, you have to manually stitch the images together in Photoshop or another app. The Air3S in contrast, does it for you.

My first attempt was at the Lighthouse Beach, but sadly, the sunlight was so damn bright I couldn’t see the screen of the RC2 controller clearly to get the settings correctly. A guess in the dark turned out to be wrong, but I did get some nice JPGs of the beach and ocean.

There are a number of options; free panorama where you define the start and end points of the image, 180°, sphere or vertical. I opted for 180° as my test and took the Air3S down to our local foreshore about 2 minutes away.

My aim was to get a panorama of the Leschenault Inlet and village area. As I discovered, it is important where you have the camera pointing when you start the process, as whilst I did get a 180° panorama as you can see, it didn’t have quite the effect I wanted ie. Very little water is in the image.

Sophisticated

And therein lies the dilemma. The Air3S is such as sophisticated beast, there is no way you can be fully formative of its total feature set in a day or so. That is not to say it is complicated you understand, just very, very feature rich. You might be expecting an original Holden Kingswood from the 1970s but get a brand new Jaguar F-Type Coupe instead, if you get my drift.

The manual doesn’t come with the drone, it is a separate PDF download. My solution now is to download that to an Orbi tablet I have that I use for such purposes (and not much else) and have that with me at all times when flying as a quick point of reference or memory refresher.

In fact, I am going to put all the relevant PDFs I have on it, not just for the other drones I possess, but also things like cameras, GoPros, gimbals and such like, and keep that in my backpack along with a power pack.

Online Videos

In the interim, its back to the Air3S manual before the next flight, hopefully this afternoon or tomorrow as the wind has picked up yet again. Actually, in practice it is a bit more complex than that, as in the 94 page manual, there is little reference to the nitty gritty of the various modes; for those you need to refer to the online DJI videos, or of course, any number of 3^rd party ones that are available – for DJI drones I particularly like https://www.youtube.com/@IaninLondon by the way.

But it has to be said at this point, out of all the drones I have flown over the past few years, to date, the Air3S is the most pleasant to setup and fly. With other models, there was always some trepidation; did it have some weird functionality I wasn’t aware of and I’d therefore crash it, or it didn’t respond to the controls the way I expected (the DJI FPV was a case in point here!).

In terms of straight flying, the Air3S just does what is expected – the rest of its cleverness is icing on the cake. I’d go as far as saying, that of all the drones I have flown, the Air3S is so far, the best by a country mile.