Alex Kavanagh here to talk props, specifically XOAR carbon fiber props for your DJI Inspire 2 and why you need them in your kit.
The DJI Inspire 2 was released on November 8, 2016, and this year marks its 3rd anniversary since the debut. It’s no doubt one of the most used and popular drones on the market; in fact I own two of them and every working drone pilot I know owns at least one as well.
As successful as the I2 has been, I personally feel from hundreds of hours experience flying it that the stock plastic propellors are not the best performing nor have the highest quality adapters that DJI could manufacture. I’ve been on set before and have had the plastic adapters break upon turning in my hands- which left us down a drone- as we didn’t have spare propellor adapters out on location. I’ve also heard many stories of the propellors failing from many different drone pilots. I think, like most things, that everything has a life span and these plastic adapters need to be replaced after a certain amount of hours to ensure the structural integrity of the aircraft. I feel like a lot of drone pilots forget this about these drones… They DO need servicing and parts replaced as they wear and tear, meaning that it’s not always DJI's fault when they fail. In saying that, I feel they could revisit the propellor adapters as well as the number of fixings into the motor mount. Two fixing points, in my opinion, is not enough. If one screw fails and gets sheared from pressure- which does happen- then a propellor will fail and the aircraft will fall to the ground.
The solution: make 4 fixing points into the motor mount. Regrettably this is something we won’t see on the current I2, but hopefully on the forthcoming DJI Inspire 3. One can only hope.
That all being said... I wanted to talk about the XOAR Carbon Fiber props, which we use on all our DJI Inspire 2 drones for our aerial cinematography production work in Los Angeles and abroad. These propellers are stiff, which means they’re extremely fast and responsive. As a pilot, I need this in my drone, as I want it to respond to my stick input as fast as possible and turn on a dime- because a lot of the time, the flying we do is for fast-action car commercials and dynamic camera scenes, and we require that low-latency and precision to nail the shot efficiently.
On a recent shoot in Canada late last year for Western Digital, we were filming rock-climber Jeremy Regoto at higher elevation. With carbon fiber props you get 25% more efficient flight times in the thinner air, so having these props at that height gave us more time in the air and important recording time.
Check this testimonial video out here, which features some of these shots:
Another benefit of these propellers is that they produce less noise! On set a few times, we’ve had directors and crew who’ve worked with drones before comment on how much quieter these propellers are, and how this helps us on set as we’re able to be less offensive with noise pollution. This was important for us on multiple, recent live-broadcast shoots where noise from the drone was an issue, but we were able to push in a little closer to the action thanks to XOAR propellors being more quiet than the stock props.
Having personally flown these carbon fiber props since the DJI Inspire 1, it’s been well over 3 years now.. so I know them well, and I swear by them after hundreds of hours flying and pushing them to the limit. The aluminum adapters are strong and has less moving parts compared to the stock DJI plastic adapters, which I’ve had crumble in my hand on a simple twist. When I do fly a drone with stock props, I notice a huge decrease in performance and I much prefer a stiffer, more responsive XOAR propellor.
Check out the full line of XOAR products at their website - https://www.xoarintl.com
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