I never imagined that I would be flying a drone or RC craft at any point ... after all the disastrous experiences in my early 30's with RC planes.As I said when and if the technology improves and the cameras, units, and Civilian GPS gets less unreliable I might take the plunge again but most likely as old as I am I probably won't see that day while I am still kicking and breathing
I do a bit of flying that necessitates take off and landing under some high power lines ... up 4 feet out 40 then ascend as needed. There is so much magnetic interference it makes calibrating the compass of the unit
impossible. But it is still able to hover and adjust ... now the units use both GPS and Glasnost signals and I usually have 8 - 10 synced in my area. After a severe rain storm with significant cloud cover and gust to 15 miles
per hour I lost gps signal and while the craft was controllable ... it did not hover in position nor maintained altitude and was skitting around like a kite. However ... did not stall nor assume an uncontrollable attitude. My
flying skills improved very quickly that morning.
I also started flying patterns within 30 then 50 feet and limited to 50 feet altitude. Figure of eights forward backward clockwise and counterclockwise ascending and descending. Got a bit of practice in the house ... with vision
positioning only as no GPS signal available.
My real drive is the feeling of motion ... ascending and moving towards and away from objects of interest that allows them to be put in perspective both visually and geographically.
The new Phantom 4 has redundant sensors and compasses but I assume you would need a hexa- or octa- copter to deal with the loss of a motor. I am fairly confident that the failure rate of the motors would be low after initial
startup ... should fail early or not likely unless the craft had been damaged in transit or crashed.
Things are moving very quickly and I think you may find in the not too distant future one that you trust enough to play with in safe areas.
The far limit is seen in this video .... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_uWlg5-6gWQ
Bob