So yeah, let me start with a story. Sorry for a long post.
I've been flying quads and hexas since 2007, building and flying units with MikroKopter then Naza-M. After that I got a Phantom 2 followed by an "OG" Mavic Pro. I've flown all of these in Mode 2 partly because it's the default and Mode 1 only made sense if you started flying gliders on single axis Tx's back in the absolute day. It never occured to me to try Mode 3.


Cut to recent months. I'm making preparations for a building project and I'm hoping to document it with aerial footage and photography. Having not flown for a year or two I thought I'd put some stick time in both in real flights with the Mavic and also in the DJI sim. I also picked up a copy of Velocidrone and have been using a Futaba InterLink Elite USB Tx with that. All have been Mode 2.

Thing is, I also play a fair amount of video games, mostly on XBox One and PS5 controllers and it occured to me the other night that the standard control scheme for FPS games is Mode 3! Particularly when you think of Mode 3 for GPS stabilised camera drones like the Mavic, the left stick is up/down left/right and the right stick controls yaw. That's the same as a FPS game, where the left stick controls movement relative to the camera direction, while the right stick controls the camera.

So I fired up DJI Flight Sim and selected Mode 3. The difference in controllability for me was startling. Since I wasn't fighting my FPS muscle memory it was much more intuitive. I had been finding in Mode 2 that sometimes I would occasionally start an orbit manoeuvre and momentarily mix up the sticks, so I had suspected I was fighting some other mapping.

Now moving to Velocidrone, that's when it started to get emotional. I decided that it made sense to try to switch to Mode 3 so that I was consistent across all platforms. I don't have any FPV or working atti or rate (acro) controlled drones so this sim is my only outlet for rate or angle control.

It was disastrous! I was totally fighting all the muscle memory I had built up over the past few weeks in learning rate control on a racing quad. The roll/yaw mixing takes a lot of conditioning to learn and I was actively trying to switch hands, each of which have instinctive reactions to visual cues.

I actually felt greif for the muscle memory conditioning I was losing! That was wierd.

It is improving, and I think as I learn to fly again in Mode 3, I may actually be learning better than before, because I'm having to think more about the thrust vector rather than rely upon learned "tricks". Work in progress, we shall see. I'm starting in Rate mode, but with a shallow camera angle, which I'm slowly increasing. I'm also inventing my own drills given that most tutorials start from scratch rather than from such an odd starting point.

Anyway, I hope you found my experiment interesting. It's certainly fascinating from inside my head.

How do you find the DJI Flight Sim.   I tried it but found I would just keep in crashing,   seemed that it was very real world to me,  but then Im a newbie with fpv.

Let's just check we're talking about the same thing. I'm on about the old Flight Sim that DJI don't promote anymore https://www.dji.com/uk/simulator

It works fine on my PC, self built Windows 10, Core i7-6700K with RTX 2070 Super.