A Pre-Flight Check That Takes Ninety Seconds

Most incidents we hear about trace back to something that would have taken fifteen seconds to catch on the ground.

Start at the props. Run a thumbnail along each leading edge; a nick you can feel is a nick that will chatter at speed and put vibration straight into the gimbal.

Then the arms. Fold and unfold each one and listen. A hinge that clicks has grit in it, and grit in a hinge becomes play, and play becomes a yaw drift you will spend the whole flight correcting.

Finish on the card and the link. Format in the aircraft rather than on a laptop, and walk twenty paces away before you check the video feed. If the link is going to stutter, it will stutter there, not at range.