Hey guys, I have a question. I have been doing a lot of research on these forums and there seems to be a lot of corollation with crashes around 30% battery strength. When flying are we supposed to bring the drone back to landing when we get to 30% to avoid it dropping out of the sky? If this is the case we really aren't getting anywhere close to the 20+ minutes of flight time as advertised.

How in the world are people getting such long flights as shown in some of these videos they are taking?

They get longer flights by taking more risks.  It's your choice, but mine is always to land & change the battery at 30%.  Maybe when you get more experience you can draw it out a bit further, but it only takes one crash to reduce your advantage to zero.  For example, it might suddenly find itself flying into the wind & not have enough power left to make it home.
Edit: Also, are the videos you see continuous or edited from several clips?  20 minutes of continuous video seems like it might be a little boring to say the least.

That is a good question. Some of these videos are 30+ minutes longer which I honestly didn't even think could have been edited. I am sure that it such a pita to get the bird back to the point where you had to land so you can continue the video. With all the technological   advances I hope one day flights will be longer than 15 minutes for such an expensive device. I did see that when flying yesterday (after I reviewed the flight logs) there were some gusts of wind up to 27 miles per hour and it had a real adverse effect on the battery as it had to fly against the wind (so I get your drift ).

Land, change battery, go back up.

it depends of your configuration if you set landing at 30% then quad will land

So this seems to be all of the factors and just hope that I am flying on a perfect day. For the flight time I guess I can get one or two more batteries so I can fly longer

sifu128 Posted at 2016-1-1 22:31
So this seems to be all of the factors and just hope that I am flying on a perfect day. For the flig ...

Thats what I did. Now my problem is I have to fly enough so that I don't go home with full batteries. I don't always know how long I'm going to fly from one weekend to the next and I don't want to leave them full for a whole week. Do I only charge 2 and hope I don't want to fly more than a half hour or do I charge 4 and spend 20 minutes hovering trying to drain the ones I didn't use to below 60%. I hope that battery technology advances to the point where this is no longer an issue.

sifu128 Posted at 2016-1-2 04:31
So this seems to be all of the factors and just hope that I am flying on a perfect day. For the flig ...

I believe flight time also depends somewhat on how you are flying: hovering consumes more power than forward flight. Typically, averaging over many flights; I'm getting about 16 to 17 minutes per battery (returning to Home with 30% warning).

I was reading on here the other day that someone said if you are flying around 30-60m you will have a much different effect than flying at 120 due to wind factors, etc. I am conducting some tests to see what I can get under each type of conditions per day when I fly.

sifu128 Posted at 2016-1-2 18:23
I was reading on here the other day that someone said if you are flying around 30-60m you will have  ...

Just be careful if your outward bound flight is with the wind...I'm not sure if the algorithm takes it into account for the return journey/flight time remaining calculation.  Maybe you'll be able to confirm one way or the other.  Maybe I'll test it for myself.