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I'll confess I was slightly confused when the GDU Byrd Drone showed up at my door last month. It's rare that a new drone maker slips past my radar completely, but a quick trip to the internet set me straight: GDU is the new name of ProDrone, which unveiled the Byrd to much fanfare at least years' CES.
The Byrd that arrived at my door was the newly announced Byrd advanced. The Byrd Standard which launched earlier this year has a built-in camera with some relatively unimpressive specs. The Byrd Advanced ditches the built-in camera in favor of a gimbal designed to fit the GoPro Hero 4 (and any newer GoPro provided GoPro doesn't change the form factor too much).
The first thing that jumps out at you when you get the Byrd is how well it's packaged. It's a small thing perhaps, but GDU has put some serious thought into this drone, all the way down to the packaging.
Once you've unpacked everything you'll notice two things, first, fully collapsed the Byrd is surprisingly compact and second, you get a very nice well padded carrying case for the included GoPro Hero 4 camera and gimbal. Having damaged the gimbal trying to put two different drones back in their all-in-one carrying cases, I really appreciated the separate case.
The Byrd's collapsible nature does mean that getting everything setup and ready to fly is slightly more time consuming than it would be with drones that don't fold up, but once you've done it a couple of times you'll get it down to just a couple of minutes. It's a small hassle to pay for the ability to shove the Byrd in a backpack and have room to spare.
As with drones from Yuneec, DJI and others you'll have to calibrate the Byrd by doing the little drone dance, spinning around in the circle while holding the Byrd out at arm's length. In all my testing the Byrd had no trouble find at least 10 satellites and calibration took just a couple of minutes.
Once you've got it set up, flying the Byrd is more or less the same as flying any other drone with a two-joystick controller and POV video feed. Anyone who's flown a Phantom will be able to use GDU's controller without much thought at all. I suppose you could argue that GDU is copying DJI, but I for one welcome the copying. There's nothing I'd like more than for every drone controller handset to have to same buttons with the same functions in the same places -- standardization is good because the muscle memory makes you a better pilot.
One place the Byrd does differ from DJI controllers is the control wheels for panning the camera. Unlike a lot of drones, the Byrd can pan the camera independent of the direction of flight. This makes it possible to get some shots the you won't be able to get with other drones, though it also means you can end up with the landing gear in your shot. This is one of the reasons that higher-priced drones (which typically can pan independent of flight direction) offer retractable landing gear. It's possible to get some unique shots without getting the landing gear in them, but the lack of collapsible landing gear does limit the usefulness of this feature a little bit.
I found the Byrd to be a real pleasure to fly. It's not quite as snappy or fast as the Phantom 4, but it's more responsive than the Typhoon H. More importantly though it's fun to fly and it responds faithfully to your commands, which gives the experience a trustworthiness that's sometimes more important than actually performance.
The only time the Byrd broke that sense of trust was the live video feed, which hung up twice when I was testing it. Both times I was testing with an older 2nd gen iPad, which may be the source of the problem since I had no similar problems on my Android phone, which, though small, was still useable.
How it handles obviously depends somewhat on weather conditions, but I found that when the GPS signal is strong the Byrd has no trouble staying locked in place in hover mode. Due to drone restrictions at local parks and the number of tree in my area I wasn't able to test the follow feature too much, but the Byrd had no trouble tracking me running down the street.
Other automated flight features include automatic takeoff and landing via the Home button, both of which worked as advertised. I don't happen to like automated takeoff, but it is nice to be able to call the drone home with a single button. The only downside is that there does not appear to be a way to cancel the return home feature once you've pressed the button. The return home feature also works should you fly out of range (the Byrd will turn around and fly home) or run low on battery.
The Byrd's battery is a massive thing, but it does indeed manage to deliver on Byrd's claim of 30 minutes of flight time. Actual flight times will depend on many factors, shoot video continuously while flying in to a 20 MPH headwind and you'll be back before 30 minutes. But in average conditions the Byrd managed to stay up for 27 minutes in my testing.
I've been testing drones for two years now and have flow dozens of models from nearly as many manufacturers. What I've been hoping to see for some time is what amounts to the travel photographer's dream: a lightweight, small package that still offers high quality photos and video footage and flying with the stability of larger models. The Byrd isn't perfect, but it gets closer to fulfilling that dream than anything else I've tested to date.
Wired: Compact, relatively lightweight means the Byrd can fit in your backpack with room to spare. Battery life lives up to claims and GoPro camera is upgradeable.
Tired: Can be a little sluggish at times, live video feed froze occasionally with older hardware
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