FPV is a broad church, welcoming geeks, weirdos, stoners, DIY hackers and 60 year old tank top obsessives alike. Within this bonkers mix, let's be honest: some personalities are more welcome than others. Read on. I guarantee you'll recognise a few of them.
1) The ex-RC hobbyist.
Pity the poor model aircraft convert. A flat-cap wearing fossil who attempted to make the transition to multirotors, he'd be more comfortable sticking those 4 propeller thingies on the wings of a 1:5 Lancaster bomber. Having reluctantly made the transition from AM radio to 2.4 GHz last week, he was lured into FPV by the power of Chinglish. Specifically, the "Computer frequency shifting very security make you fly happy" motif scrawled on the advert for his now-battered RTF Syma. Having recently realised that Betaflight embraces everything about life that he knows nothing about, he's off to trade what remains of his social skills for a new computer. With at least 1 VGA connector...I mean, USB port. Whatever that is.
2) The junkie.
You can't approach the junkie without first stepping through a vapour cloud that smells faintly of armpit sweat. Swigging on the herby smoke is normally not something you'd associate with operating a 130mph flying ripsaw, but he insists he's doing it to relax. And, bizarrely, it's working. Watch him do Mattyflip after Mattyflip through his old graffiti-caked drug den haunts, his quad screaming through the concrete confines as he passes out in a camper chair. All the while aided by an 84Dbi gain IBCrazy helical antenna held between his teeth that he's mistaken for a six inch dooby.
3) The Plug-in Prat.
You'll know when you come across Plug-In Prat. Start flying your craft, and at the point when things are most critical, I guarantee he'll pay a visit. Bye bye, video feed. Hello, Plug-in Prat and your video transmitter that you've set to 3000 milliwatts for no good reason.
Unlike the ex-RC hobbyist, the problem with Plug-In Prat is that he's too familiar with tech. More concerned with his toys, in fact, than anyone already in the air. Born in 1995, he never had to worry about radio frequencies; 2.4 GHz went mainstream before he'd learned how to shit. Why, with his brand new fatshark HD0s purchased just last week, should he be bothered now? And besides, he usually flies alone, so it's never been an issue before. Nor, with several disgruntled racebanders hurling rocks at his now-sprinting form, will it ever be again.
4) Failure-Fraught Fred.
Poor Fred. All he ever wanted to do was get his batteries charged and reflash his flight controller, and everything is now sparks, smoke and dead children. Yes, he definitely checked the polarity before popping the connectors on. Yes, he insists he did the research on parallel charging before hooking up 18 boards to an unsuspecting ISDT, then casually brushing a stray paperclip across a couple of innocent-looking terminals. Well, how was he to know they were live? And that "unbrickable" flight controller is now a chip-coated bookmark, thanks to a CLI dump that told the CPU to do the Hokey Cokey on loop. Fred still shows up at the field occasionally, if only to watch Plug-In-Prat remind him that at least his own chaotic lifestyle isn't causing misery for others.
5) Danny the DJI fanboy.
Danny's always been into his gadgets. He was an Apple follower ever since he swallowed his dad's iPhone 3g at the age of 11. And unlike Ex-RC Hobbyist, he knows a USB from a drinking straw. So it was natural, then, that Danny would do the wise thing with his Alternative Hipster Media college fund, and blew it all on a Phantom 4+.
One frazzled pylon and a criminal record later, Danny realised that his understanding of gadgets was not matched by any knowledge about how aircraft actually work. A year on, with the Phantom's blackened remains consigned to the bin, Danny tried FPV racing and was stumped. What are these chip capacitor things? And what's this about solder pads? Is there an app for that? Rather than learn the new skills, Danny is frequently seen paying fantastic sums to more DIY-inclined types to do complicated repair jobs for him. You know, like replacing a single broken prop.
6) The Freestyle Fanatic.
This is typically a parkour or BMX semi-professional who spends as long in a workshop as they do defying death. Racing? Gates? Those reek of rules, man. Try doing a 1,000ft power loop above an old crack den before threading through a broken window at 120mph. Or creating a new one in the process, who knows? After a few high speed flips around a concrete jungle, expect to hear a splintering crunch of plastic and carbon fibre. That's either the freestyle fanatic wiping out or, more likely, the result of the weed junkie suffering a comedown as his spice wears off.
7) The Cheapskate.
This guy would fly Tesco own-brand vodka if he wasn't already putting it in his car's fuel tank. More excited at the thought of unmarked £2 motors than anything that an Emax label would be seen dead on, he wonders why stuff just randomly stops working mid-air. But unlike Failure Fred, it's nothing to do with hooking up a wad of TNT between the LiPo terminals and soaking the thing in petrol. Rather, he should read one of the several online reviews that clearly state that the motor's bearings are made of stilton cheese. Don't bother asking him to purchase decent kit. He'll just tell you that he's bought so many £120 RTF Eachine TrashFires that "the next one's bound to work perfectly".
8) The Teacher.
He's very welcoming to the newbies, prattling on about frequencies, MosFETs and firmware patches until the likes of Danny the DJI Fanatic drop their transmitter and run off screaming. Those who survive the initial onslaught of "advice" actually find the teacher a useful resource, always on hand to stop your camera from doing a rampant rabbit impression during hard throttle or figuring out why your new receiver is telling your radio to go do one.
The problem is, he gets carried away. The rest of us are perfectly happy lending our goggles to a curious three year old as long as 1) they are eventually returned and 2) they haven't been chewed to bits. But the teacher takes this to new extremes, offering newborn babies the controls to a flying human-blender despite the parent's desperate protests. The sound of props meeting flesh and the whining of a now-decapitated puppy are frequent consequences of a situation that started with the words "Don't worry. It's in level mode".
9) The Bling King.
Upgrades. They make your quad fly faster, further away or less likely to end up in a coma following a 90mph crash into a cowpat. Unless you're the Bling King, who seems to be a magnet for everything that's made of anodized aluminium and coloured like neon vomit. See that 10-position switch on his Taranis, crafted by a robot in a Swiss cave for the price of exactly 1.5 of his children? It'll be replaced with a Flysky Nirvana next week, because it just wasn't dang shiny enough. As for the Swarovski-encrusted Session mount with a 48 carat diamond lodged in the middle, he'll tell you that it, er, reduces wind resistance. Rumour has it that Dronejunkie spent seven months persuading him that his proposed custom Martian frame was best not made from solid gold. Just when you've realised that his fluorescent earings are actually Returner R6 motors, your gaze is distracted by a supernova on the horizon. Except that's his actual, 50-watts-of-LED-strip-equipped quad.
10) The Race Organiser.
Many things make the race organiser stick out. Risking his life mid-race to rectify knocked-over gates is one of them. Hating everyone else in this list is another. He's also the only one who knows what the words 'frequency cross-talk' and 'signal repeater' mean. When he's not trying to get a 100mph quad embedded in the side of his skull, he's poring over a laptop at times when no one really knows why anyone should be poring over a laptop. Something to do with "code", "compiling" and "your mother", apparently. I'm not complaining, because the only way I'll ever land first place is when he inevitably overlooks a bug on line 227.