High-Speed Predator Z51 With a Fad for Ages 14+

We are already prepar­ing to ful­fill the New Year’s wish­es for chil­dren. Our kid made a wish with San­ta Claus an air­plane on the con­trol pan­el. The hus­band, as usu­al, com­pli­cates every­thing, and instead of buy­ing a toy accord­ing to the age of a five-year-old kid, he would rather buy one that he him­self would not mind play­ing with. So, we ordered a non-toy drone, a high-speed Preda­tor Z51 with a fad for ages 14+.

What is inter­est­ing about this mod­el? Sim­ple, but aero­mod­el­ling, prac­ti­cal mate­ri­als and hull design, sig­nif­i­cant dimen­sions, easy con­trol (accord­ing to age), the pres­ence of a gyro­scope, range and flight time.

Technical description

• Item Name: Preda­tor Z51
• Body mate­r­i­al: foam, plas­tic
• Col­or: Gray
• Span: 660 mm
• Length: 400 mm
• Engine: 816
• Pro­peller: 5.6cm
• Bat­tery: 450 mAh
• Flight weight: 88 g
• Flight time: 20 min
• Charg­ing time: 60 min
• Remote con­trol: 2.4GHz
• Remote con­trol: 4*AA (not includ­ed ) Con­trol range: 150m

Packaging, delivery set and appearance description

In front of me is a Preda­tor Z51 air­craft. The pack­ag­ing is a large card­board box with a car­ry­ing han­dle. Gross weight 560 grams. The box shows the mod­el, main tech­ni­cal capa­bil­i­ties, image of the device and oper­at­ing con­di­tions.

The pack­age includ­ed:

• Air­craft (com­po­nents)
• Bat­tery
• USB charg­ing cable
• Plas­tic wing retain­er
• Screw­driv­er
• 3 bolts
• 2 spare pro­pellers
• Remote con­trol
• User’s man­u­al

The air­craft was packed secure­ly, and this is not sur­pris­ing, because the air­craft itself is made of foam. This is a pre­fab­ri­cat­ed mod­el, there­fore, a set of parts that are placed in a foam back­ing.

This toy mod­el copied the orig­i­nal well: every­thing is in order with dis­guise in terms of col­or, the wingspan, as expect­ed, is almost 2 times the body length, the tail is V‑shaped. from a copy, there are 2 engines and they are on the wings.

About the gray body — this is not good in cloudy weath­er at a great dis­tance, it is easy to lose it. The wingspan is good, and the plane holds its bal­ance well when land­ing. But about the tail — there is a flaw here, in a real preda­tor it is made in the form of an invert­ed let­ter V. I was not mis­tak­en, there is only one way to install the tail, as in the pho­to.

The case con­sists of com­bined mate­ri­als, main­ly — it is a strong foam. There are some plas­tic inserts.

Body length 40 cm, at the widest point 5.5 cm. Wing length 33 cm.

The wings are marked L / R, 2 screws, one on each, from which thin wires stretched. the plane was assem­bled with­in 5 min­utes with­out instruc­tions, but it is includ­ed in the kit. Instruc­tion in Eng­lish and Chi­nese. You will not need any spe­cial tools or glue to assem­ble the air­plane. The only thing, maybe for the first flight you will have to recharge the bat­tery. And yet, the first launch will be can­celed if you do not have 4 AA bat­ter­ies for the remote con­trol at hand.

The chas­sis is attached to the body, the tires of which have pads made of soft mate­r­i­al. The chas­sis is well cush­ioned by a thin spring-loaded wire.

Remote control

It is a large square case with beveled cor­ners made of mat­te black plas­tic. The plas­tic is strong. The case does not creak when pressed. The con­trol pan­el is rep­re­sent­ed by 2 joy­sticks, the left one moves up/down, the right one moves left/right. Under the joy­sticks there are 2 but­tons, the right one is a trim­mer, the left one is a mod­el. The on / off switch is locat­ed in the cen­ter, it works soft­ly with a click. There is also an indi­ca­tor of the oper­a­tion of the device. On the front end there is a car­ry­ing han­dle, a 2.4 GHz anten­na and 2 side but­tons, the right one is respon­si­ble for the back­light (but it is not pro­vid­ed in this mod­el), the left one is the speed con­troller.

On the oppo­site end there are legs for set­ting the remote con­trol in a ver­ti­cal posi­tion, in the cen­tral part of the case there is a strap mount. On the back side there is a slot for 4xAA bat­ter­ies.

In work

Before pro­ceed­ing with the descrip­tion of flights, a few words about instal­la­tion — the device is mount­ed quite eas­i­ly, no spe­cial instruc­tions for its assem­bly are required, it is enough to install and con­nect the board, bat­tery, attach the land­ing gear, fix the tail sec­tion and acti­vate the con­trol path by sup­ply­ing it with 4 bat­ter­ies of the type AA.

The air­craft is con­trolled only by the remote con­trol, no spe­cial mobile appli­ca­tions are required. Here it is nec­es­sary to describe the oper­a­tion of the PU but­tons. Let the large num­ber of but­tons on the remote con­trol not con­fuse you, some of them are fake. The left joy­stick acts as a gas ped­al and has a for­ward / back­ward stroke. The right joy­stick allows you to steer the air­craft left/right.

In order for the air­plane to take off, you should start it with the pow­er but­ton locat­ed on its body and turn on the remote con­trol. This estab­lish­es a con­nec­tion between devices. This air­craft does not need a run­way for accel­er­a­tion, it can take off by hand. In this way, launch the air­craft hor­i­zon­tal­ly into the wind, only a small angle of incli­na­tion up to 15 degrees is allowed. For a nor­mal drone flight, weath­er con­di­tions should also be tak­en into account. The man­u­fac­tur­er says about them in the instruc­tions, the case does not have mois­ture pro­tec­tion, and to start you should choose a calm day with­out pre­cip­i­ta­tion. Wind speed should not exceed 4 m/s. Of course, we did not wait for such weath­er and test­ed the air­craft in harsh con­di­tions for it.

The range of the remote con­trol is no more than 150 meters, then the air­craft los­es con­tact with the con­trol source and crash­es. If you need to urgent­ly inter­rupt the flight, just turn off the pow­er but­ton on the con­trol pan­el, the pro­pellers will con­tin­ue to work for anoth­er 3 sec­onds, then they will stop and the plane will crash.

It is worth say­ing that in those descrip­tions, the man­u­fac­tur­er also warns about the max­i­mum weight load. Thus, the man­u­fac­tur­er allows the instal­la­tion of addi­tion­al mod­ules, such as a back­light or a small cam­era (not includ­ed).

To land the plane, you need to slow down and bring it as close as pos­si­ble to a flat sur­face. For a soft land­ing, the design pro­vides for wide wings and spring-loaded land­ing gear with soft wheels. In order not to lose them dur­ing plant­i­ng, I would advise you to take them for glue.

This air­craft mod­el is equipped with a sta­bi­liza­tion sys­tem, due to the gyro­scope, and also has feed­back from the remote con­trol to sig­nal the bat­tery dis­charge.

The bat­tery life of the drone is 15 min­utes. The bat­tery is charged with­in an hour. The USB cable is used to charge the bat­tery. To extend the flight time, you can buy a spare bat­tery, but you will need a screw­driv­er to remove it.

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Conclusion

So, our drone after the first flight remained with­out dam­age!!!

At the moment, this was the only launch, because. the plane will be giv­en to the child. The weath­er turned out to be non-fly­ing, and our fly­ing object was intractable. Dur­ing a strong wind, it was not pos­si­ble to launch it out of hand, although I watched a video where this mod­el is eas­i­ly launched in this way. There were hard land­ings and an acci­den­tal fall into trees (dur­ing the flight, the gas ped­al was com­plete­ly released). In the trees next to the “preda­tor” (preda­tor) sat a huge plump hare! and then how it will run … From sur­prise, I was con­fused and did not have time to pho­to­graph either the attack of the preda­tor or the hand­some hare.

The plane is quite frisky, but respon­sive. An adult will like to con­trol it, and the flight is much more inter­est­ing than the flight of a quadro­copter. But I don’t dare to say that a child of 5 years old will cope with his con­trol.

What I want to say about the qual­i­ty of mate­ri­als and reli­a­bil­i­ty, of course, at first glance, the foam body will seem unre­li­able, but prac­tice has shown that foam prod­ucts are ide­al for flight and soft land­ing. This mate­r­i­al is not in vain used in the man­u­fac­ture of toy fly­ing machines, this makes them light and cheap. From expe­ri­ence: even after an unsuc­cess­ful land­ing, it is like new: the case is intact, the screws and remov­able parts are in place, there are no vis­i­ble signs of use.

Con­clu­sion: Preda­tor is a great drone and lives up to its name!