Verry kewl!
A couple of questions before I buy one.
1. How much gyrocopter flying have you done prior to this gadget? It looked like you knew what you were doing. How many 'hours' are in your logbook?
2. How noisy is it? It's electric, but it's got four rotors...
TIA
It is super easy to fly. The only copter flying I've done in the past was those little indoor things you get at the mall and I could never control them worth a crud. The controls for this are really simple. They consist of 2 levers. Left lever axis 1 is up and down, and axis 2 is rotate left or right. Right lever axis 1 is forward or backward, and axis 2 is drift left or right.
In GPS mode, it tries to hold position. In reality, it drifts a little here or there but generally stays where you left it.
The hardest part of controlling it is when you get it so far away that you have a hard time seeing which direction it is heading. You have to just try some controls and see what it does.
It is also smart enough to remember where it took off from. If the controller fails, it will autopilot itself to an altitude of 60 feet about the starting point, then fly back over the starting point, hover for 15 seconds, and then land itself.
The video you saw was split between myself (the part up to where I fly it into a tree) and my 13 year old son. Neither of us had any significant copter experience and none with a quad copter. That was my fourth or fifth flight (a battery lasts about 10 minutes of flying time) and my son's second flight.
As for noise, it's about as loud as an electric string trimmer. When it is close, it definitely buzzes a lot. Once you get it 20 feet away, you hardly notice it. If that's important to you, I'll get out a decibel meter and give you some readings.
So far, it seems durable. I've crashed it into the ground once and trees twice and it has survived with nothing more than nicked blade (which I sanded out and re-balanced).
If you plan on ordering one for photo/video work, I would expect to buy some accessories. So far, I bought a case for carrying it. I bought a propeller balancing system. I bought a little carbon fiber and rubber stabilizer. I also bought an extra battery. After playing with it for a few days, I decided to order two more batteries and a second charger. Batteries are good for 8-10 minutes of flight time and require about 2 hours to charge. With four batteries and two chargers, I'll be able to get in a little over half and hour of flights in with a four hour charging break between groups of flights.
