 Take the plane, he said, to work. It'll be more convenient than the truck. Hey guys, welcome to Road to Riot, and this is episode six of First Flight to Freestyle. We're gonna get you upside down today. We're gonna have you hold it. We're gonna have you loop it around, go back through. That's right, we're doing power loops. One of the most iconic tricks in FPV. I am honestly genuinely slightly terrified of this because he wants me to fly through this little gap, which, I mean, what? This is not an hour. This is an excellent location that we're at. Thank you for letting us fly here. This is the Chalet Airport. I gotta say thank you to my uncle. He is the one who's actually been watching the episodes. He's excited to see the ones here at this location. And for those of you guys in TV land, it has been about three weeks since we filmed the last episode and this guy set me up with liftoff. He said, Eric, you've gotta get some time in on the sticks. Gotta practice on the sim. Gotta practice, I got some bad news for you. You practice a lot and struggled? You, you practice a little bit and struggled? I haven't touched it. You practiced zero. So we had an air show. If you guys don't know what we do, we fly powered paragliders or paramotors all over the world flying at air shows in really cool places like that and on our channel youtube.com slash maybe there you can find out more, but we had a week long air show intermixed with practice and everything else. I haven't been able to touch it. So that's why I'm anxious not to mention. Don't be, you got a great coach. It's gonna be great. Okay, this is an excellent gap. It's big, it's spacious. Don't worry, what you're gonna do is you are gonna fly through yon gap. You are gonna power up back and over it and then fly back through it. And we're gonna break it down. We're gonna start you out in the open area. We're gonna, we're gonna let you do a little bit of boxing. We'll see what it is to kind of box the power loop out. All right. And we're gonna smooth it out. We're gonna get you there. You will power loop. I have a lot of confidence you'll power loop this day. You've been learning so fast. Well, I didn't do myself any favors without practicing but I appreciate the opportunity and I'm excited to see how hard I can crash today. So guys, if you're new to the series, this series is where we're taking Eric from being a complete noob to doing freestyle and we're really getting into the thick of it today with power loops. But if you're new here, check the link in the description to this full playlist where you can see the first episode where he was flying the DJI FPV drone in normal mode, tooling around with all the nannies. It was baby mode, let's be honest. Baby mode, but you progressed quickly to manual mode. You did some coordinated turns. You progressed from there to doing flips, rolls and even a Rubik's cube. And now today, the power loop is going down. So so far, a lot of the tricks you've been doing is just out in the open air and like, yeah, you can do a Rubik's cube through a gap but it's not a power loop unless you power loop around something. So like you have to be playing with the terrain now. Do you forget last episode? No, no, I know what happened, you're fine. You're gonna be fine. You got it out of your system. We're running out of these drones. You realize, we're running out of these drones and now you want me to go around something. We're gonna start you, we're gonna start you with some open air extras. Are you feeling warmed up? Here, take off and just do whatever it is that you like to do to warm up. I will say the camera on this still impresses the snot at me. Yeah, it's incredible. Yeah, nice slow rolls. Let's see a nice fast roll. I think the rates on this, whoa, those rates are pretty good. Yeah. So you're getting to a nice low crew. We're not going for the gap yet. Hold up, hold your horses, Mr. Anxious here. I mean, no, no, no, just go out to, yeah, we'll practice going through the gap. There you go, you're good. But before we start trying to loop that, we're gonna have you do that in kind of an open area. So in the open field here, we're getting to like a nice low, slow cruise. Low and slow, let's come back around toward us. And then what I'm gonna have you do is pull back on the pitch stick so that you're looking up at the sky and add throttle and just bail out of that. Okay, so you see how you gained altitude and kind of thrusted backwards, right? So what I want you to do is keep that going. So you're gonna pull back on the pitch stick and you're gonna throttle up and keep pulling back on the pitch stick. Keep pulling back on the pitch stick. Maybe cut throttle, cut throttle. There you go. And there was a really aggressive throttle chop because I couldn't tell how, how you were because you were looking at the sky, right? So audibly it sounded like you were going up but I didn't know. So you're going, maybe I'd be chopping throttle. Okay. I just wanna see where I was. Yeah, you're going up nice and high, which is good. We're gonna eventually work on getting those loops tighter but try to maybe more pitch and less throttle so that you're not going quite as high. So start reducing throttle, keep. Whoa. So you're doing what a lot of people do when you start learning the power loops where you power up and then you flip out of it, right? So we wanna try and work on making it really more of a loop. So we're gonna try and stay constant on pitch. Now cut throttle, but don't increase pitch. When you are chopping the throttle, you're simultaneously increasing how much pitch you're giving it so that you just flip out because it's- So try to rotate slower. Just keep a nice consistent slow rotation. Now cut throttle, don't move that pitch stick. Keep it, keep it, keep it going. And nice bail, that was really good. That was really good. I'm trying to keep it, it's not working. That was really good. That was really, really good. When you look at the sky, when you lose sight of the ground is when you wanna bleed off the throttle and then just keep pitching around. Just keep that loop going. And as you start to see the ground again, now you're gonna wanna- I really washed out on that one, didn't I? That was perfect throttle control. As you saw the ground, as you became level, you bled into the throttle. And also like you're already starting to do smooth throttle inputs. Like when I was telling you, I was like, ooh, chop throttle. You don't really wanna chop throttle, right? You wanna bleed off the throttle. That's really pretty. Bleed onto it. It is really nice. But why am I falling off axis? I don't know why you're going off axis. That is interesting. Cause I know it's windy, but like I'm- I'm gonna try and watch your thumb really carefully. You really wanna give it just, just pitch. I think you might be given a little bit of a roll on your way up. All right, so. So let's see it. Just pull back. It's nice that we have this runway because, see what was that? You, I'm seeing something at the top of your loop. You're like giving it some yaw. Maybe. I think it's just as I'm pulling the power back. Let me see. I'm watching your thumbs as close as I can. That was good. That was just about perfect. Almost crashed it. I mean, yeah. But as far as not going left or right, that was just about perfect. All right. I see, I thought this was gonna be unattainable. Honestly, like when you talk about that, this feels, this feels doable, but doing it around an obstacle is gonna be a different story. Don't worry, don't worry. We're nice and, we're taking it nice and slow. I'm not gonna push you quite as fast cause we saw what happens when I did. So I'm gonna push with the power, pull it back. And see, there's that nice line of a cloud. They had a contrails. It was a contrail. It's nice. You seem to kind of naturally be using that to line yourself up. So if you're doing a power loop in an open area and there's no clouds in the sky and you just go blue, you have no frame of reference. But these clouds give you a little bit of a frame of reference and that nice linear cloud in particular gives you a very clear line of reference, meaning keep that line right in the center of your screen and you'll know that you're doing a very axial. You'll be doing a very on axis power loop. And I like how you just really instinctively started being smooth on throttle. You know, I was starting you off by doing throttle chops and it's really not what you wanna do. You wanna have an inverse relationship between throttle and your attitude. Gotcha. So as you're potentially flat, you want lots of power. As you're inverted, you want no power or very little power. But it's the pitch stick itself. It almost doesn't change position because you find when you put the pitch stick in a position, that defines how fast the drone is rotating. And a good loop has a consistent rotational speed. So you basically bleed into a position on pitch and just hold that pitch stick in the same spot and just modulate your throttle as you go around the loop. Okay. So you're getting antsy for the gap. No, I'm anxious. I'm so anxious right now. So here's what you're gonna do. You're gonna just do a big old power loop. You're gonna just power up to the sky and you're gonna look back at the gap and you're not even gonna worry about going back through it. That's kinda like the next building block is you're gonna do just like, like my first power loop was through some trees and I just went to the moon and flipped over upside down so I could see the trees again, right? So just power, power, power and just get that. There you go. That was terrible. It was terrible. But it's getting used to the idea of going through something and power it. You didn't power back up into the pipe. You didn't crash at all. So it's really not. It's an improvement over last week. That's what happened. I like using this road to line up. This makes me feel like I have some confidence of going over to the road. This is a really good training spot because you've got lots of reference points. Power lines on the other end of this. No, these nice linear things to keep you on track. So you wanna keep this road. You're gonna fly through and you're just gonna power up. Power up and just, you know what? Just bail out. There you go. There you go. You're doing really good. That's really good. I'm anxiety, man. That's really good. So why don't you land it and let's talk through what you've done so far and what you're gonna do to build on it and start doing it less terrible. Sounds like a plan. It's fun though. It is really fun. It's less scary than I thought it would be. I did a freaking power loop. You did power loops, man. You did power loops. So for this, as I'm going through the gap, so obviously I'm taking the gap really slow versus the power loop in the open air and moving pretty quick. So I should make it a little bit faster, pull back simultaneously and then pull power and keep the same stick setting or pull back further. Let me grab the drone. Let me, let me. Yeah, let's walk through this. You're not necessarily gonna use 100% power, but let's just say you are. Right. Okay, but 100% is probably overkill. But you're coming in, you're cruising at 30. You're going up, you're at 40, 50, 60, 100% power. Then when you get to here, maybe 80, 90, 70, 60, 50, 40, 30, bleeding off all the way, maybe down to 20 or 10 at this point. You don't ever have to really chop it. Okay. But maybe you get down to 10, five. Fall in, very, very low. And then just keeping the rotation. And then as you're, now once you pass that vertical point again, once you start, that's when you're 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, catch yourself and then. So that's what I've been missing. What I've been doing is I've been going through, coming to here, power off to idle, off at idle, off at idle, off at idle. Save me. And that's okay. That's okay. A lot of power loops start like that. Like when I learned this trick, I would just go through something, go, whaa! Go, ba! And then, wha! And fall, fall, fall, fall. Save me. Okay, so I'm not doing it as I thought. And then. No, you're doing great. That's how we all learn. It's almost like a box when you're learning. When I learned, I was really boxing it. That's it. I didn't really think about that. I would go through, I'd go up, pitch back, power back, whaa! Let it fall, catch myself all messy, and then fly back through and be like, I'm the king! I did a power loop! It was not a power loop. You are the king. And it's not. But it's just getting you used the idea of powering backwards, getting back through a gap, and then taking that really gross box, and starting to shave down the edges. And then there's just so much that you can do in it with your own style, right? You could kind of like toss yourself through it, or you could stay under intense power the whole time, right? One of the difficult things is that your input and reduction of power isn't coupled with pitch per se. It's really about the drone's position. So you're going forward. You start pulling back on pitch, adding power, adding power, adding power. And then, okay, I'm getting upside down. I start bleeding off power. I don't move that pitch stick. Because if I move the pitch stick, I'll start rotating less. You want to keep that pitch stick right where it is. So pulling back, we're going upside down, we're going to sit down low power. You know, I've completed it, I'm looking down, and I'm starting to look up. Still holding that pitch stick, start bleeding onto power, and it's only then when I'm starting to get the horizon level again, that's when I start leveling out the pitch, getting to a forward-flight position, back through. Pulling back on pitch, power, off power, on power. That's what we're going to do, and we're just going to work our way towards doing that through the gap, right? So we're going forward, pulling back, power, off power, on power. And the whole time through that loop, my pitch stick didn't move. I was watching that. I'm going to do it again, and this time I'm going to verbalize the pitch stick. So pulling back on pitch, holding, holding, holding, holding, holding, holding, and less pitch. So it's just holding that same position, because if I vary the pitch, it'll vary the loop, which isn't bad if that's what you want. Maybe I want to do a bit of like a toss. Boom, right where that was like kind of more of a elliptical sort of thing. I did a little bit quicker of a pitch at the top, like whoosh, maybe you want that. But it's more about like being intentional with it and not doing that because you're panicking. So I'm doing that kind of quicker at the top because I'm choosing to, not because I'm panicking. The way to do that is to learn the basic first, where you're just holding a nice, consistent, probably about like half pitch, and then back on the power and reducing pitch. So that power punch comes so fast and it has to be timed so right. That's where I think I'm going to struggle. So now we'll do it through here. So we're just going forward. I'm going to do it real big, real big. Woo, all the power back on the power. Doesn't bad, just a big loop going through power, cutting power, holding pitch, holding pitch, adding power, going back through. We'll do another one. It's like a merry-go-round. And you just hear it with your ears, the power. It's on, it's off. It's coming back on, on, off, coming back on. You can just do this all day. It's on a carousel. That one was a little close. Did you see how I almost didn't make it back through because I didn't power back enough, right? The big thing for me, the big takeaway is you're saving it with power at the bottom of the loop instead of using pitch to bring the nose back up faster. You know, it's a mix of both, because here I'll do kind of more of what you just said where I save it with power and look at how dirty it gets. So I go back through and just kind of wait and then save it. Did you see how much the drone wobbled? And also it killed my speed. You're doing, as the momentum is moving, you're just gradually bringing that power in. I was bringing the stick back further. Ah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's the big difference to me is you're really able to just manage power versus pitch. Yeah, it's about smooth power. So if you're not smooth on the power, if I just go, if you're not smooth on the power reentry, if I go back through and just kind of dump in the power, woo, the drone, I mean, the drone shook so much I just about fell out of the sky there. And abrupt power movements equals jerky drone, right? If I just on it, look at all that, right? So you want to be on and off the power nice and smooth. So we're just bleeding onto it, going upside down, bleeding back onto it versus, you know, jerking into it, going upside down, jerking back into it. Something that you can do that's fun with power loops is use that top, the loop, that zero G to throw in a trick. Maybe while you're upside down, throw in a roll, right? Or throw in an extra flip, or a yaw spin, right? That inverted yaw spin we learned last time. Woo, a little messy, but you get the idea there. Too much fun. All right, half the battery, right? Half the battery, I haven't, it's fun, I don't want to stop. All right, no, no, this episode's supposed to be you flying, it's supposed to be you. Tap, tap. There, there. You sure are going to nail it this time. I can feel it. Gotta figure out how to hold this. I wish that this transmitter was just a little bigger. Right, it's very game controller. It's very game controller. Now let's see an open air loop again. That was really shiesty. Oh! I just did not have enough pitch in that one. See now that you've done it through the obstacle a few times, I almost feel like it's getting more difficult for you to do it in the open air. I think you're right. Because you're used to having that frame of reference, which is fine. Yeah. This is a nice big gap. So as long as you go through the gap and sufficiently power up, nothing bad is going to happen because you can always bail out. You can flip out early, you can, you know, 180 out of it, whatever. Try to force yourself back more. You know, you're going at an angle there. Yeah. So then you're going to kind of corkscrew it, right? That's exactly why I was like, eh, I don't like this. You've got the driveway, so you might as well use it. Take your time, start further back, line up. More back, more back, off the power. Start bleeding onto that power. Yeah, yeah. If you hadn't corkscrewed it. That was sick though. That was good. That was good. I get the flow. You corkscrewed so you weren't lined up for the gap again. I think you're starting to use roll in the air. So you can just try to just pitch, just throttle. You don't need roll. You don't need y'all. Woo! You're nailing it. Getting better. You're nailing that power delivery. You just keep corkscrewing out. So just work on getting that alignment up. And I mean, you've got great, confident pitch control. You've got smooth power delivery. You know how to power loop. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. I went through. Ha, ha, ha, it wasn't pretty, but I went through. You know what to do. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. I tell you what, man, this is awesome. This is so fun. It's such a good challenge. And anybody who's at home and is thinking about doing this, use these videos as a guide. Because honestly, if I didn't have you in my ear, like telling me what I have to be like, forcing me through these challenges, I wouldn't do it. I wouldn't do it. I would not be. Start getting onto that. A little heavy, but still. Still smooth, still smooth. Yes. All right, hey, you ready for this? We're gonna just throw on a whole another trick real quick. Start your power loop, okay? And then right when you get to the top of it, and when you get inverted and see horizon again, roll out. Ah, roll, roll. Boom! You just did an emelman. So that is a way to bail out of a power loop if you're ever worried that you didn't make it back far enough to go back through. And when you do it on purpose, then it's a trick. Because you already learned the Rubik's Cube, so you already know how to do variations of pitch and then roll. Now you know how to power loop. So now, take some of the building blocks from a Rubik's Cube and take the smoothness of a power loop, and oh, now you earn no money. You can just do a whole another trick. We're gonna have you do a line here. First, we're gonna power loop once. That's good, that's good. Can you make it back through? All right, go back through, and now emelman. Oh, oh no! Oh no, oh no, I think it's okay. I thought I was gonna make it back through. It was close. I think you'll be okay. You're on it, you're on it, I'm just gonna reset you. I think you're gonna be okay. Oh no. No, you're fine, you're fine. It'll fly, get ready, sit back down. I'm just bending your props back. You're hot, man, you're hot, no need to stop. I just wanna see this line. I wanna see him power loop it, go back through, emelman it. Then he'll have to learn. Here we go, went straight forward. Power loop, that's okay, it's nice and big. Go back through. It was big, but it was smooth. And now emelman, roll out, yes, yes, that was awesome. Eric, bring her home, bring her home because I really shouldn't be letting you fly that battery. That was freaking sweet. Bring her home, oh yes. Stuck the landing, we're gonna stop the recording. We stumped the landing on that one. Oh my gosh, guys, I'm telling you, if you're doing this on your own, you've gotta listen to people like Drew, you gotta watch these videos, give yourself a mission and a task. This morning I didn't think I was gonna be able to pull off a power loop. Yeah. And we just did our first one. That was freaking amazing. You hit that pipe, I went and got it, and I can tell all the props were fine, the arms were fine, the camera was fine. It was gonna fly, but the back of this battery here is toasted. This battery is not one we will use again. And I know that we're kinda casual with some things, we're bending props back, we're just kinda standing at some time, just smacking the camera gimbal back into place. The battery is one thing not to mess with. Lithium polymer batteries are a very powerful battery chemistry, which is awesome because they let these drones do crazy things. That also means that this could explode, this could be very dangerous. And we don't need to explode these things in the house. If something like this happens, take it to a place that does battery recycling and recycle it, you can just take it to Best Buy even. And you can drop it in the bin. If there's any piece of equipment that you're careful with, it's the battery. Makes sense. So, guys, thank you for watching this episode of First Flight to Freestyle. Eric, you are learning so fast. That was really impressive. I just, again, really think this illustrates how the more you learn, the more you learn. I think it really illustrates the importance of having a specific goal. Because if I was out here trying to learn this on my own, I would still be out here on the runway, flying around, maybe doing a flip here and there, but being pushed toward a really specific target. Yeah, that's made all the difference. That's what we try to do with this series is put together a set of goals that as you work through them, and then just, at the end of the day, they're like, hey, man, let's just real quick learn an Edelman. It was easy. It's too much fun. Edelman's done airplanes. That helps. Right, well, you've done it in real life. Well, I tell you what, this has been awesome. Thank you so much for having me on today. And I promise that this time I might actually do some simulator time. There's a link in the description to this full playlist. So if you're just tuning in now, hopefully you enjoyed seeing what you can work toward. But if you're starting out, start with episode one. Start with learning the basics and work your way up. And you can go from your first flight, just touring around in normal mode to doing power loops and Edelman's manual. Super fun stuff. Awesome stuff, awesome stuff. Guys, new videos here on the Ritterite channel every Monday. Make sure you hit the subscribe and notification bell. And if you don't have enough YouTube in your life, check out our channel at youtube.com slash aviator where we release new videos every Friday with crash drones, paramotors, airplanes, and all sorts of crazy fun stuff. Do you think it's cool that we're doing tricks with a toy? He does power loops with his body. He's flipping himself with a giant fan and a parachute. I'm better with that than I am with this, but I'm working on it. It's just so funny to me that this is still exhilarating after you've done flips. But there's something very immersive about FPV drones. If you guys are just getting into it, you're gonna have a blast. Welcome to the best hobby ever. We'll see you next time on Ritterite. See y'all later.