DJI announced a new drone product, Mavic Air. I personally own a DJI Mavic Pro, so I am familiar with the product series and the brand. To me, Mavic Air is not a downgraded and cheaper version of the Mavic Pro. Instead, in my mind, Mavic Air takes one step closer to the ideal consumer-level drone product.
From DJI Website
Go Beyond Specs
If you look at the product specification (which you can find at a table in the end of the article), you will find the Mavic Air gets an extremely closed performance to the Mavic Pro Platinum with only 60% of the weight and 70% of the price. However, when we are talking about the consumer product, the spec is not the ultimate thing we will look at. Instead of numbers, we pay more attention to what kind of the experience the product offers in the context of usage. So let’s talk about the context of flying a drone.
Why We Want to Fly a Drone
Why we want to fly a drone in the first place? I thought about this question for about one year before I ordered my Mavic Pro Alpine White. My simplest and most straight-forward answer is that I love the aerial-photography. Those aerial photographs give me a different and sometimes stunning view of the world. The city landscape, the architecture, the fall, the country road, and so on. Those photos always fascinate me and pull me out of the world that I am used to. However, when I got my own DJI Mavic Pro and took it to Bahamas in the past Christmas, I got an entirely new feeling: instead of pulling me out of the world. The drone actually exposes me to the world around and gives me a more comprehensive, stronger and deeper feeling. You can easily move up to the 30-floor height and move around freely to observe the world: the movement of ferries and cars, the geometry of the city, the island in the ocean, the tide, etc. It delivers an almost enlightening feeling to me, after I spent so much time with the screens of the digital world. It brings me closer to the physical world.
What is an ideal consumer-level drone
So in the context of the drone usage, what we truly care about is the content from the camera and the freedom of flying; in other world, the drone itself should diminish its sense of presence. That’s why I think the name “Air" is a good idea, and the product itself is closer to the ideal state. Without compromising the camera quality, the gimbal stability, and the flight capability, Mavic Air successful shrinks in the size and the weight. This makes it more convenient to be carried around and fly with ease. What’s interesting to me is Mavic Air’s FlightAutonomy 2.0:
“Using advanced VIO technology, the powerful sensor system in FlightAutonomy 2.0 consists of a primary gimbal camera, forward, backward, and downward dual-vision sensors, downward infrared sensing system…...Advanced Pilot Assistance Systems (APAS) allow the aircraft to bypass obstacles in front of and behind it actively. Your grand adventures of discovery have never been so safe and easy.”
From DJI Website
Ultimately, the ideal drone that we want is an intelligent flying camera: it will be able to immerse you to the stunning view of the world around, and fly autonomously based on your will. The racing drones are exciting, but it is not for the public. The drone will help us to explore and discover the beautiful world around us, without need to worrying about its control or safety — this should be handled by the machine itself.
DJI does a great job to revolutionize the consumer-level drone. I am excited to take a trial of the product Mavic Air, but what I am more looking forward to, is the opportunity of exploring the world with freedom and joy.
Appendix - Spec Comparison between Mavic Air, Mavic Pro Platinum, and Spark
