I really believe that sky to you as a company is just a hot air balloon, a bunch of hype to raise their valuation in the eyes of unwary investors.
I had a Skydio 2 from the first batch. I took a bite of about $2000 on a start up company that couldn’t even give me a reasonably accurate delivery date or expected delivery date or even tell me where I was in the queue.
Of course this raised my suspicions.
I’m a real estate photographer and wanted the Skydio 2 for those up the driveway and into the front door shots.
I was impressed by their no crash guarantee and by that video that showed the S2 flying autonomously through very dense Woodland.
The impression I got after watching that video was that if the Skydio 2 could do that, it surely could fly up the driveway and into the front door of the home.
My expectations were cut short when flying down the driveway with me just 10 feet behind it, it hit a small branch and crashed to the ground. The lighting was excellent and the small branch wasn’t minuscule, I just Didn’t see it myself.
Skydio declined the no crash guarantee claiming that hitting a small branch isn’t covered by their no crash guarantee. Can you believe that?!
I had to pay for replacement drone
Since that time, I’ve had numerous problems with the Skydio 2 Drone. Among them problems connecting, problems disconnecting, a gray screen instead of a video feed at times during a flight that was not recoverable and finally at a recent shoot, I took the images off the microSD card and imported them into my editor, Lightroom. Every image was bright red as if I had a dark red filter over the lens. The images were unusable and unrecoverable and I had already left the shoot when I discovered this, obviously.
Worse yet, the support people told me that this was a known problem and they were working on it. If it was a known problem, all users should’ve been made aware of it so they wouldn’t use the Skydio for an important shoot only to find after the opportunity was over that the images were ruined and unusable. Even if this red image issue was an occasional problem, the drone would be unusable for any important shoot because sometimes reliable is the same as unreliable. Users would simply not have used the Skydio drone until the problem was resolved and proven resolved.
That was the last straw.
To make a longer story short or shorter, Skydio agreed to refund my full purchase price on everything including the enterprise program.
I don’t want to even hear the word “Skydio”again.
I might say that it took about two weeks after they received the product back to issue the refund.
I’ve been a drone photographer for three or four years maybe a little longer with thousands of missions with DJI drones starting with the phantom three when it first came out.
Now, my go to Drone is a DJI Air 2S.
I’ve had all kinds of Mavics before that including the Mavic air two, the Mavic pro two or is it the Mavic two pro, and usually had no problems aside from there poor customer support. But their product works, at least for me, all the time, and I’m not going to stray from the path.
That’s it from me!
