While shopping the market for a drone, there are many things to consider. Is durability one of them? Well, it should be, but it's not usually taken into account while shopping. Depending on your reasoning for adding a drone to your inventory of gear, you probably are focused on image and video quality combined with flight time.With the release of the DJI Mavic Pro, we started seeing drones coming in more compact and smaller sizes with excellent image capabilities. Looking for something small but still able to record in HD and take great images, the new DJI Spark might be the one you have your eye on. With its much smaller size, it could be the perfect travel companion if you don’t need 4K… or even as a second drone. While in flight, the drones could come under attack as we have already seen in this post. So this brings up the question, how durable is the new spark, what will it take to make it crash?
Alex Assenmacher with We Talk UAV sets out to do some stress tests on the little drone to figure out exactly that. Too much of my surprise, this little drone can definitely hold its own and is quite durable. While we didn’t get to see how the Spark fairs against some bird attacks in this video, it looks like it actually needs some force to make it go down. I wouldn’t suggest flying over a large body of water if you foresee any other acts or obstacles that could cause it to go down. Maybe that’s another test that could be performed, how much water can the little drone take? Pouring a bottle of water over the drone mid-flight is tested, but maybe a more realistic test should be with a water hose with a nozzle on a shower type setting to simulate rain so we could see how long it would last in flight. Would be good to know how long you have if it ever started raining while in flight. How did the little Spark hold up to your expectations?
Zap it with a Taser and see what happens.