FlyTech Dragonfly — WowWee takes wing

In the past I’ve written about two easy-to-fly radio-controlled planes (the Aero Ace Biplane and the Aero Ace Jet) and a radio-controlled car/plane/boat hybrid (the Storm Launcher). This time around I’d like to introduce you to something a little more — um — natural: a radio-controlled insect. Well, to be precise, it’s a radio-controlled dragonfly, and it flies by flapping its wings like a real dragonfly. Really.

The FlyTech Dragonfly is made by WowWee, the same people who brought you those more down-to-earth R/C toys RoboSapien and RoboRaptor. This time around they’ve apparently decided to take off in an entirely new direction.

Watching the Dragonfly flying around a room takes a bit of getting used to. Just like its inspiration in nature it has two wings on either side of its body which quickly beat up and down to provide lift. On this dragonfly the wings only provide lift and don’t help with steering like they do with a real dragonfly — that’s something that even the engineers at WowWee didn’t attempt to mimic. Instead they took a page from the way a helicopter is steered and added a small rotor at the tail end of the Dragonfly’s body. The tail rotor is quite small and unobtrusive and doesn’t make the Dragonfly look much different than a real dragonfly as it flutters around.

A real dragonfly has very strange, iridescent eyes that look quite a bit otherworldly. The designers of the Dragonfly took that cue from nature and made the eyes of the Dragonfly unique — they’re not iridescent but they are bright blue LEDs. The LEDs don’t just look cool while the Dragonfly is in the air, they also pulse while the Dragonfly is charging. When the eyes stop pulsing the charge cycle is complete. The Dragonfly takes about 20 minutes to charge and will give you around 7 minutes of flying time when it’s topped off. Not too bad.

Although the Dragonfly is amazingly lightweight (around 0.9 oz.) it’s pretty durable. I’ve crashed mine into just about every wall and every item in my living room (including myself) and I’ve yet to do any damage. The body is made of a lightweight compressed styrofoam and the wings are made of a light transparent plastic. The wings get their structure and additional strength from thin stays which run the length of each wing. Just remember to cut the throttle when the Dragonfly crashes and you should be fine.

The Dragonfly is also durable enough to fly outside, assuming that the conditions are calm. In fact, outdoor flying gave me the opportunity to crash the Dragonfly into all types of new obstacles — trees, shrubs, and myself (again), and, just like after my indoor flying, no damage was done to the Dragonfly. If you’re going to fly outside you’d better wait for a time when there is no wind, though. When you have a toy with a 16-inch wingspan (or wingspans, in this case) which weighs less than an ounce even the slightest breeze is overpowering.

Flying the Dragonfly is just like flying a radio-controlled plane. The left stick on the controller is the throttle control which, in this case, makes the wings flap faster or slower. A bit more than half throttle is enough to keep the Dragonfly flying straight and level. Adding more throttle makes the Dragonfly slowly climb and reducing the throttle makes the Dragonfly fall.

The right stick on the controller is used for directional input. Moving this stick right and left makes the small rotor on the back of the body spin and that makes the Dragonfly turn. Once you get the hang if it you can switch the controller from “normal” to “expert” mode for tighter turns. There’s also a trim control just in case the Dragonfly doesn’t track perfectly straight.

So how easy is it to fly? Up until now I considered the Air Hogs Aero Ace biplane the easiest thing for new pilots to fly because of its slow speed. The Dragonfly actually travels a more slowly but its beating wings give it a more frantic (and mesmerizing) flying style. While both could be flown indoors in a large room by more experienced pilots it’s safe to assume that new pilots will need to go outside until they gain a bit of experience. If the conditions are dead-calm I think the Dragonfly might be the easier of the two to fly because of its slower speed. In any other conditions I’d give the nod to the Aero Ace.

In the box you’ll get the Dragonfly, the transmitter, an extra set of wings, an extra tail rotor, and a small piece of ribbon which attaches to the back of the Dragonfly to slow things down a bit when you’re flying indoors. The included manual is pretty thorough and will walk you through the process of getting your bug into the air.

At the moment the Dragonfly is available exclusively from Radio Shack but over the next few months it’s supposed to show up on the shelves of Target, Toys-R-Us, and even Best Buy. It costs $50, which is almost twice as much as the Aero Ace planes. Then again, there are a lot of radio-controlled planes on the market, but there’s only one radio-controlled flying insect.

Related Posts