Amazing bando FPV rip highlights pilot skills, DJI goggles

Scott Simmie | Feb 8 2021 - 5:14 pm PT

The amount of talent in the global community of drone pilots never ceases to amaze us. Today, we’re highlighting a pilot from Serbia who rips through abandoned buildings with a crazy level of skill.

Depending on the structure, bando flying can take an incredible amount of savvy. Popping through holes in concrete and ripping through broken windows takes skill. Crashes against cement tends to be far less forgiving than earth, and things can happen fast. When we stumbled across today’s video, we just knew we had to reach out to the pilot with some questions.

And that pilot, Vladimir Muncan, came back with some really excellent and insightful answers.

Some background

Vladimir lives in Novi Sad, Serbia. It’s the country’s second-largest city and lies northwest of the capital, Belgrade. He’s been flying FPV about two and a half years, and He. Is. Awesome.

This particular site, as you’ll see, looks almost like something out of a video game. There are holes between the floors, an exposed elevator shaft (we think), plus a hole in the roof that appears to have once housed a chimney. (Yes, he dives it.)

Digital vs. analogue

Vladimir was especially interested in testing out DJI’s FPV goggles for this flight, and comparing whether the relative lag would be significant versus analogue. He also embedded the goggle view in the main video, so you can compare. Let’s take a look, then we’ll hear his comments:

That’s insanely good FPV piloting…

The DJI Goggle verdict?

Here’s the question this flight attempted to answer: “Can DJI be used for bando ripping? Which is better, analog or digital?” It’s hard to imagine finding a better location. And here’s Vladimir’s answer – taken from his original Facebook post:

Here’s the boiled down version: Flying digital inside this bando felt like playing a video game at 30 fps with vsync turned on. You see everything clearly, but you feel this big hefty latency behind you, but if you go with it and fly around it (by “thinking ahead” in terms of where your quad is going in your line), it’s completely doable and even a little fun in a balancing act sort of way, but not as comfortable as flying analog. Flying digital you have to “fly ahead,” because you have very little reaction time as the video you are getting is not as real time as analog. So you fly in a way that you need as little corrections as possible. Pulling off flips and hitting gaps requires you to be a little more mechanical and dialed in with your sticks and rates while the latency gets this bad. Versus on analog you don’t have the latency so you react in the very last second, you don’t have to plan your line ahead as much, you just have to stay on it.

Vladimir says he’s going to work on a longer video exploring this topic with narration, but we asked him if he could sum up the difference in a nutshell.

“It comes down to what you prefer,” he tells us. “Seeing everything both near and far more clearly but having less time to react versus seeing what’s far away less clearly, but you have a lot more time to react, which means you can fly faster and rip harder.”

Let’s check out another reel

Once we saw that video, we had to look at some others. You can check out his channel and subscribe here, and we think you might want to after seeing this compilation reel. He’s fantastic:

Wowza. Great locations, great flying…

Any advice for pilots who’d like to fly like this?

We figured some of you would like us to ask that question, so we did. Here’s what Vladimir said:

It really depends on the pilot and where they’re at on the FPV learning curve. The main thing is practice and stick time, but which aspects you need to practice depends on you, and what you’re aiming for. A good place to start is learning to “skate” with the quad. There’s an old video from Bob Roogi (kababfpv) where he explained it best. But what it boils down to is learning to manage your throttle and momentum of the quad in a way that looks good. Never go in a straight line unless that’s the shot your going for, always try going side to side, it looks a lot smoother. But it all comes down to how the quad feels while it’s moving through space and managing it’s momentum, sending it where you want it to go. Short answer, learn how to skate the quad, then start messing with rolls and flicks and higher throttle stuff.

He also recommends Velocidrone as a simulator, and says it’s his go-to.

Vladimir works in the IT field full-time, and squeezes as much building and flying into his spare time as he can. Becoming a great pilot has opened a lot of doors for him, and he’s been asked to fly a number of gigs. But FPV is not super popular in Serbia. Vladimir says the online community totals about 150 members, and that includes some pilots from neighboring countries. Monthly income in Serbia also lags behind many other countries, so it’s an especially pricey hobby, relatively speaking.

“Living the FPV lifestyle in Serbia is rather taxing, considering the average salary is 300 bucks a month,” he tells us. “Now I do a bit better than that, but as you can imagine, a 50-dollar vtx hurts my wallet a lot more than somebody else’s who lives in better-off country. And I pretty much pour all my spare income into FPV.”

Oh. And the gear list?