New freestyle trick worked over pine forest flying

Oct 18, 2026 Last reply: 13 hours ago 3 Replies
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The moment that got me first is the low point: about 44 seconds in, the quad starts spinning fast under the canopy, sinks, and meets a ground layer of pine needles right beside a trunk. Given how tight the trees are, a hard landing on a soft needle bed is about the gentlest way for that to end, and the maker seems to treat it as part of the session rather than a disaster.



The learning path behind this flight is what I find most interesting. The basics came from a tutorial creator, then a few hours went into a simulator, after which the trick got its first real-life reps on a whoop. Only then does it show up flown on the quadcopter in the forest. Staging it like that, from sim to tiny craft to the real machine among trunks, seems a sensible way to build up without gambling the main quad early.



Other details that stand out: the flying holds a 30 degree angle, and the run is packed with vertical dives, inverted loops, barrel rolls and fast climbs back up through the canopy. The feed is an onboard wide-angle view with barrel distortion and dark vignetted corners, and there is no telemetry or on-screen display text anywhere in it, which keeps every bit of screen space on the trees. Recovery matters too: the maker has hooked the craft on branches, dropped to the ground, rearmed and carried on, and notes that thin branches meant a stuck quad could still power its way out.



The one open question for me is consistency. The trick gets flown on every outing now, and I would love to know how reliably it lands in air this cluttered, since the clip only gives one full run to judge.


The staged progression is the smart choice here. A few sim hours are cheap, a whoop is cheap, and by the time the trick reaches the real quad among pine trunks the maker has already paid for mistakes twice. The trade-off is that the whoop stage probably takes longer, but for a maneuver that ends in trunks and needle-filled ground, that seems worth it.

When the trick moved from the whoop over to the quadcopter, did the timing carry straight across, or did it need a fresh round of adjusting for the bigger machine? Getting through those tall straight pines at a 30 degree angle seems like something where the craft you practice on would matter, so I am curious how that handoff went.

Since the maker already uses the simulator for the basics, one concrete idea: run dedicated sim sessions with dense trunk spacing set up to match this forest and push the trick through at different approach angles around the current 30 degrees. Mapping how much clearance the maneuver actually tolerates before touching the quad might make the real-world reps in the pines far more predictable, branches and all.

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