• Use these drone flight exercises to gain confidence, develop your situational awareness, and to warm up your thumbs if you’re feeling rusty.
  • Hover and Yaw — Take off and hover around 8-10 feet above the ground to check for any abnormalities. After confirming everything is okay, practice yaw movement by rotating the drone on its horizontal axis using the left joystick.
  • Target Practice — Establish two zones and practice targeted takeoffs and landings between the two areas.
  • Up, Out, and Back — Thrust your drone up to 75-100 feet, fly it out the same distance, then rotate it 180 degrees and fly it ‘inverted’ back towards you.
  • Square Pattern — Fly your drone in a square pattern, focusing on slow, steady, and precise movements. This exercise can be done with your drone's nose pointing away from you or by using yaw to rotate at each corner.
  • Circle Pattern — Fly your drone in a continuous, smooth circular motion, while keeping the diameter of the circle consistent. This combines the pitch and roll functions and helps improve fine control.
  • Max Altitude — Thrust your drone up to the maximum allowable altitude of 400 ft. This helps to increase your confidence when flying at higher altitudes.
    

• If you’re a new drone pilot looking to get more comfortable on the sticks, or if you’re flying a new drone and trying to get a feel for how it moves, go through each of the six exercises in this lesson.
  

Let’s get up in the air, folks. The drone training exercises in this lesson might seem simple, maybe even too basic at first, but they do build on each other.

Mastering each of these movements will not only help you become a more skilled drone pilot, but you’ll also be safer and better prepared for different emergency scenarios, and certainly a more professional pilot — one who could work with higher-paying clients or perhaps be the leader of your department’s drone team. 

Personally, I still run through each of these exercises when flying a new drone, or if I haven't flown a drone in a while, and I need to get a feel for its weight and movement and how the sticks are responding.

The goal here is to have you develop a strong sense of directional awareness while flying. These exercises will help you gain confidence with your movements as you work on your spatial awareness.

Alright, let’s take off!

Hover and Yaw

First, let’s hover and yaw.

Now, different drone models have different takeoff sequences, but essentially you are turning on the motors and then pushing forward on your left joystick to thrust the drone up off the ground.

The first step is to take off to about 8-10 feet, just above your head, and hover. And what you’re doing here is looking and listening for any abnormalities. Are there any weird vibrations or sounds? Is your drone drifting around a bit and doesn’t seem to be locked into a precise GPS location? If anything feels off, you’ll want to land your drone and go into detective mode to see what’s going on.

And this is something you should really have on your pre-flight checklist and should be doing at the beginning of each flight. So you are taking off. You’re hovering for about 10 seconds at about 8-10 feet off the ground. Getting those motors warmed up. Looking and listening for anything weird, and then after you’re all clear, you can proceed with your flight.

And in this case, we’ll proceed to our first exercise, which is to practice the yaw movement. Yaw is one of the four main drone movements. You’ve got thrust, yaw, pitch and roll. Yaw is when your drone rotates on a horizontal axis. Imagine a clock face that is laying on a table. If you take the left joystick of your controller and gently push it to the left, the drone will rotate to, say, 10 o’clock. You can then take the stick and gently push it to the right, and your drone can rotate to 2 o’clock. Get comfortable rotating between 10 and 2, and then practice pushing that left stick all the way to the left or right to get that full 360-degree rotation. Get a feel for how sensitive your joysticks are and how the drone responds to your movement. Every model is a little different and – fun fact – in many models you can actually go into the software and tweak the sensitivity of your joystick movements.

Target Practice

Our next exercise is target practice, where you will practice targeted takeoffs and landings. And if your drone model supports automated takeoffs and landings, you can use this exercise to take off and land all the different ways that your drone model allows. The goal here is to get comfortable and to build confidence around that important moment at the beginning and end of your flights.

First, set up two zones about 10 feet away from each other. Then take off from zone A and thrust up to about 10 feet.

And here’s where I will introduce the right joystick. Pushing this stick up and down allows us to pitch forward and backward. And pushing this stick to the right and left lets us roll it from left to right.

To fly over to zone B, I would recommend using the left stick to yaw until the nose of your drone is facing zone B. Then I would take the right stick and push forward to pitch the drone forward until you get over to zone B.

Then, you’ll want to center your drone over the landing zone, using that right stick to very gently pitch forward and back or roll left and right to keep adjusting until you’re centered over it.

And if your drone has a camera that can pan straight down, this can be a fun way to see if you are centered over the landing zone.

Then you’ll use the left stick and pull back to bring the drone down toward the ground. And in many drone models, simply holding that left stick down back will eventually turn the motors off. But let’s not do that just yet.

Next, you'll simply repeat the process, taking off from zone B and then flying over and landing back at zone A. And you can do this as many times as you’d like.

Up, Out and Back

Your next exercise is the Up, Out, and Back. In this move, you will first take off and thrust up to 75-100 feet. If your drone has flight software with telemetry data on it, try looking down at your phone or tablet or remote control to see what exact altitude you’re at.

If you’re flying a toy or hobby drone, please be mindful of the wind, as smaller and lighter drones can get pushed around quite a bit at this altitude.

So from here, you’re simply pushing the right stick forward to fly out about 75-100 feet. Then you’re rotating your drone 180 degrees using the left stick to yaw around. Then, with the camera facing back toward you, you will push the right stick forward to fly back and then down to land. 

Now, what you’re doing here is flying back using inverted controls, because now the nose, or the front, of the drone is no longer facing forward — it’s facing back toward you. So if you think about using that right stick to not only pitch the drone forward but also to make adjustments to the left and right, then it might feel weird because if you’re looking up at the drone while you’re doing this, pushing to the left actually makes your drone move to the right. Because it’s inverted.

It can get a bit confusing and even make you feel dizzy at times, but it’s really important to get comfortable here. An obvious sign of a skilled drone pilot is someone who has strong directional awareness regardless of which direction the drone is facing.

Square Pattern

Your next exercise is to fly a square pattern.

Now, you’ll want each side of your square to be about 10 feet. You’re focusing on slow, steady and precise movements here. No need to be too high in the air for this one. I’d recommend somewhere around 8-10 feet off the ground.

You can try this first with the nose of the drone pointing away from you, aka forward, the whole time. And really you’re just using the right stick to push it forward, to the right, then back, then to the left, and repeating that a few times to trace a square in the air.

You can also try this with yaw, where you will rotate your drone 90 degrees at each corner of the square. So instead of pointing forward the whole time, your drone will now be pointing in the direction that it’s moving.

Circle Pattern

In this exercise, you’ll be flying a circle pattern. In the square pattern, you’re flying with distinct stop-and-start movements, but in this exercise, you're keeping the drone in smooth motion in a circle. And your goal here is to keep the same diameter, or size, of the circle at all times.

You’re going to keep the drone pointing forward the whole time, and you’re going to pitch and roll at the same time. This is quite a difficult maneuver, and you may need to practice it a number of times. Notice the subtle movements of my right thumb as I kind of pitch and roll at the same time. Once you feel comfortable flying a circle in one direction, try flying in the other direction as well.

Max Altitude

The last basic training exercise I have for you is to fly at the maximum allowable altitude, at least here in the U.S., of 400 ft. Of course, not all missions require you to fly this high, but I’ve found this to be a useful exercise. When I teach people how to fly, I’ve noticed that it can be quite nerve-racking for newer drone pilots to do this. And what we’re trying to do here is to get you more confident behind the sticks, so this exercise is worth doing.

So all you’re doing here is just using your left thumb and pushing it forward to thrust up to 400 ft. It’s just incredible to fly at this height, and the world looks absolutely amazing from this vantage point. So while you’re up here, snap a few photos! Feel free to use your left thumb to yaw around and get a good look at your surroundings. And if you're able to pan your camera up and down, try panning it straight down to get a bird's-eye view of the world below the drone, and see if you can spot yourself waving to your drone in the process.

Okay, that wraps up our basic drone training maneuvers. If you’re a newer pilot looking to get more comfortable on the sticks, or if you’re flying a new drone and trying to get a feel for how it moves, I hope you find these exercises to be helpful.

I’ll see you in the next lesson!