Quadcopter Shootout 2 – Ease of Flight
If a quad doesn’t fly well it isn’t worth your hard earned cash. For our Ease of Flight category we assembled our BigSquidRC Bash Crew and had them fly each quad until they were satisfied that they could rank them. In our crew we had a variety of different skill levels, 3DBill is an expert quad pilot, Brian and Adam are intermediates, while Tim and Cubby are both relative noobs. After each tester ranked the quads we tallied the scores and came up with a winner. Of note- we did not allow our testers to talk about how they felt about the quads until after we had recorded their rankings. We did this to prevent the results from becoming skewed by someone else’s comments.
Here is how each of our testers rated the quads for ease of flying –
Cubby (Noob)
1. Ares Ethos 130
2. Blade 180
3. LaTrax Alias
4. Align M424
Brian (Intermediate)
1. Ares Ethos 130
2. Blade 180
3. LaTrax Alias
4. Align M424
Tim (Noob)
1. Ares Ethos 130
2. LaTrax Alias
3. Blade 180
4. Align M424
Adam The Intern (Intermediate)
1. Ares Ethos 130
2. Blade 180
3. LaTrax Alias
4. Align M424
3D Bill (Expert)
1. Ares Ethos 130
2. Blade 180
3. LaTrax Alias
4. Align M424
Just like in golf, the lower the score, the better.
| Points | Quad Name | Score |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Ethos QX 130 | 5 |
| 2 | Blade 180 QX | 11 |
| 3 | LaTrax Alias | 14 |
| 4 | Align M424 | 20 |
Here are the overall rankings for the Ease of Flight category –
1. Ares Ethos 130 – 5 pts – The winner of Ease of Flight by a landslide was the Ares, it was ranked first by every single tester. What put it on top was its smooth throttle and how incredibly stable it was in the air. Virtually anyone can put the Ares up in the sky and easily fly it.
2. Blade 180 – 11 pts – The Blade was also an exceptionally easy quad to fly but was ranked second because it was slightly harder than the Ares.
3. LaTrax Alias – 14 pts – In third place was the LaTrax. Testers commented that it was less stable than the others and had too sensitive stick input.
4. Align M424 – 20 pts – The Align finish last because it was down on power, it required a lot of trim adjustments, it had bad yaw, and it far over-reacted to slight inputs at the sticks.
Next up is Features or head back to the beginning shootout page.
