Why DJI’s Built-In Simulator Is the Best Free Way to Practice Before Your First Drone Flight

Good day, folks. Shawn here from Air Photography. In today’s video, we’re taking a look at the DJI simulator that’s built right into the DJI Fly app.

The reason I’m making this video is that the other day I got an email from a viewer asking if I could recommend a good simulator. They had just bought the Mini 5 Pro and wanted to practice a little bit before going out for their very first flight. I emailed them back and mentioned that the one built into the Fly app is actually a really good and accurate simulator. They were quite surprised — they weren’t even aware that it had a simulator built in.

So I thought I’d make a video, because there might be others out there looking for a simulator who don’t realize you can do it right on the controller. That’s great for anyone buying their very first drone, even the new DJI Neo. You’ll be able to practice in the simulator first, get a feel for some of the basic maneuvers when using the sticks, practice taking off and landing, and a lot of the functionality works exactly the same as it does in real flight.

Which Controllers Support It

The nice thing is it works on both the DJI RC 2 — the one with the built-in screen — and the DJI RC-N2 and RC-N3, where you mount your smartphone. It’s a little bit different on the RC-N2 and RC-N3: you do have to download a separate DJI Simulator app. With the RC 2, it’s built right in, and you launch it by tapping on DJI Simulator right there at the top.

Essentially, they work exactly the same way. However, with the RC-N3 running on your phone, you have a few extra maps for different locations, and a few extra features such as FocusTrack — you can actually use that in this setup. With the RC 2, currently FocusTrack is not available in the simulator. I’m going to demonstrate on the RC-N3 for this video.

The Drone Hangar: Picking Your Aircraft

When we launch the DJI simulator, you’ll notice a couple of different things we can do right off the start. There’s something called the Drone Hangar that lets us go in and select the specific drone we want to fly with. Right now, I’ve got the DJI Mini 5 Pro selected. We can also select the DJI Air, and on the downloaded version, we can select the DJI Neo.

The Neo is only available currently on the downloaded version with your smartphone — it’s not available on the RC 2. But really, for the most part, it doesn’t matter what drone you select. They’re all going to function about the same. I’m going to leave mine on the Mini 5 Pro.

Basic Courses vs. Immersive Flight

From the main page, there are two options. We have something called Basic Courses, which gives you a few exercises to help get you comfortable on the control sticks. And then we have the main simulator over here under Immersive Flight.

I’m going to tap on Immersive Flight. As you can see, we have many different locations — five to choose from. On the RC 2, it only provides three locations. Not all of them are downloaded yet — some have a little cloud icon, and we just have to download the information for that specific map. I’ll select this one and download it. It’s 321 megabytes.

Once it’s downloaded, we just tap Go Fly. Before we start, we have to place our aircraft, and our little robot guy is going to place it for us.

The Same Menus You’ll See in Real Flight

Once we’ve placed the aircraft, we get the exact menu system that you’re going to see when flying your aircraft for real. It’s extremely accurate. We can even go into our settings and adjust the behavior of obstacle avoidance and return-to-home information. We’ve got control settings we can adjust, and we can customize our buttons. So it’s going to give you a really good feel of what to expect. It even simulates your battery usage and your satellite count at the top.

Taking Off and Practicing the Sticks

I’m going to go ahead and take off here. We can take off in two different ways — we can use the takeoff button, or we can push the sticks down and in. I’ll use the takeoff button.

Now we can raise our altitude. This might be a little rough — I’m sitting at a very weird angle to the controller, so it’s not going to be very smooth by any means — but as you can see, it simulates just like you’re flying. It’s a great way to get a feel of how the sticks work and the movements.

It’s not only to learn the different movements, but also to polish them, to get smooth and get really nice cinematic shots. You can practice your orbits and some of the different maneuvers. You can even use the controls on the back to adjust the gimbal.

Testing Obstacle Avoidance: Brake vs. Bypass

It even simulates obstacle avoidance. For example, when we’re in Cine mode or Normal mode, if I try to fly into this tower, you’ll notice that it won’t let me — the obstacle avoidance has come in. We have it set to brake.

But if I set it to bypass instead, when I go to try and fly into it, you can see that it just went around it. That’s the difference between brake and bypass: bypass will try and find a way either over the obstacle, as it’s doing now, or around it.

In the simulator, we can also adjust whether we’re capturing photos or taking videos. We can even do MasterShots and QuickShots right in the simulator.

FocusTrack on the RC-N2 and RC-N3

One extra feature you have when using the RC-N2 and RC-N3 compared to the RC 2 is access to test FocusTrack. I can turn it on, maneuver out of the way, and get up a little higher. Just like with a real drone, we can select a subject and it gives us the different options. I’ve got it in Spotlight now, and you can see as I fly around, it keeps what I’ve selected in the center. We can also do Point of Interest.

Return to Home, Fully Simulated

It’s an extremely accurate simulator and will really help you learn to master the controls of the drone, get you comfortable so you’re not quite so nervous for your very first flight. Even Return to Home can be fully simulated. As you can see here, I tap on Return to Home, and the drone makes its way back to the home point.

A Great Tool Before Your First Real Flight

So that is the DJI simulator — a great tool to help you get comfortable with your drone before you head out for your first flight. As mentioned, it’s fully compatible with the RC-N2, RC-N3, and the RC 2. And if you have the high-end DJI RC Pro 2, it’s built into that as well and can be fully utilized.

Hopefully you enjoyed this video and found it had value.

You can find more of my drone tutorials and reviews on the Air Photography YouTube channel, and you can read more of my articles on my DroneXL author page.