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Unaccompanied Minor: Propel Ultra-X + Wi-Fi

Auto-land? It doesn't mean what you think.

This is the box the drone comes in

Today I will be reviewing Propel Ultra-X + Wi-Fi. I will tell you about the good and the bad. First the good:

The drone comes with some good things, like a 16 GB SIM card, a phone holder to connect to the controller, two batteries and a charger. I like that fact. The controller itself also has some features on it like auto-land and can take a photo/video as well as it can do some tricks with the stunt button (but I never perfected this part of the drone). I had this drone for about one year and half and in that time it flew fine and I was happy with the camera that was built into it.

Here are some of the accessories that came with the drone

Now, for the bad part of the drone:

I wish this drone had a feature that would bring it back to where it started, because of what happened to me. Here is what happened to me.  One day I went to a park with a lot of open space but there was water on 3 sides. I had just charged my battery the night before so it was fully charged. I started flying the drone at the park when we were in the middle of the land area and it was responding to my controller fine but all of a sudden the drone started taking off and started flying farther and farther away and I tried to auto-land (one of the features on the controller) before it started flying over the water. It didn’t work. I tried turning it and it didn’t turn. It wasn’t because I am not used to it since I practiced with it at other parks over the past year and a half and it worked fine.

It was the drone itself. When my dad and I started following it, it took off over the water. Then we lost sight of it. The controller was no longer controlling. The drone got up maybe 10 feet in the air and then it would not respond to the controller and it just took off, further and further away over the water. My dad and I drove about a mile to the other side of the water to see if it landed there and we couldn’t find it even though we kept looking and looking for it.

This is the drone

So later that week we emailed the company and they said that they couldn’t do anything unless we had the actual drone. But we didn’t have the drone because it stopped responding and working as it should have so we couldn’t do anything. The company would not work with us. I was very disappointed because I thought drones are supposed to be fun and have a lot of range and I know it was still in the advertised range when it stopped responding. I was disappointed in the company. From my point of view, due to its customer service and the lack of response by the drone and the fact that it doesn’t have a feature that returns it back to it’s launching point, I would not recommend this.

1 Comment on Unaccompanied Minor: Propel Ultra-X + Wi-Fi

  1. Janny Chaiyavet // May 2, 2020 at 9:01 pm // Reply

    Hi Chase,
    Thank you for this well-written, and pros vs. cons, review. I have gotten Finn a couple small drones in the past few years, and they end up frustrating us, or only run for a limited time. Please let us know if you find one that you like, for his age group: 9-10 years old.
    Bad customer service is definitely something we do not want to deal with, so I appreciate the heads-up.
    I like the kid-as-user critique. Thanks!

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