Drone Flying 101 - An Interactive Tutorial for Beginners › FPVSIM Drone Simulator

Welcome to the world of drone flying, where the sky is your playground and the possibilities are endless! Whether you're a photography enthusiast, an aspiring filmmaker, or simply a thrill-seeker looking for a new hobby, flying a drone opens up a whole new realm of excitement and exploration. In this tutorial, we'll take you through everything you need to know to take to the skies with confidence and skill.

1 minute of theory

So what's the main difference between flying a drone versus driving a car? Mainly, drones move in 3D spaces whereas cars (if not jumping LOL) runs on a 2D surface. It's probably common to you of the X-Y-Z axes in 3D environments. In areospace, we call them a little differently, which are Roll-Yaw-Pitch, as illustrated below

You can see that compared to cars, where you can only control the Yaw axis, airplanes give the extra Roll and Pitch axes control. The same goes with drones. Enough theories, let's play!

Lesson 1: Hover

Try to throttle up/down so that the drone can hover in the air using the joystick on the left by dragging the center dot up/down. This controls overall lift (thrust) generated by the drone propellers, the higher the throttle, the faster the propellers will spin. For best experience, make sure your screen is wide enough.

Lesson 2: Turn (Yaw)

Try to turn left/right using the joystick on the left by dragging the center dot left/right. This controls how the drone rotates around the vertical (YAW) axis.

Lesson 3: Bank (Roll)

Try to turn left/right using the joystick on the right by dragging the center dot left/right. This controls how the drone rotates around the longitudinal (ROLL) axis.

Lesson 4: Nose up, nose down (Pitch)

Try to move the nose up and down using the joystick on the right by dragging the center dot up/down. This controls how the drone rotates around the lateral (PITCH) axis.

Lesson 5: Now let's fly forward

For regular drones, since there's no horizontal thrust, the only way to move horizontally is by leaning towards the direction you want to go. Try to throttle up a little bit and pitch forward (nose down) to reach the mountains in front of us.

Lesson 6: Coordinated turns

Now let's fly around using both sticks. For best experiences, use a device with touch screens like a smart phone, tablet, or some laptops. To play in fullscreen, please add our site to your home screen by following this tutorial ‐ how to play FPVSIM Simulator on iOS/Android.

It's going to take some time to calibrate yourself on how much stick deflections you need so the drone can point to the direction you want it to point to, but after a few sessions, you'll be able to fly like those guys/gals on YouTube.

Congratulations, you have graduated from the "newbie village"! You can continue to fly in our web based simulator at FPVSIM Web which contains more features to help you learn to fly or download our desktop versions with more realistic graphics on our home page.