Welcome back to the channel today, it's something new from zod. Here it is it's the drift it's. Finally, in the house and we're going to talk about this new miniature portable glider, you can actually get this under 250 grams, which is pretty impressive if that's, what you want to do, you can achieve that with this glider, which is really neat. You can also put your insta 360 on there and get some pretty cool video we're gon na play around with that camera today, i'm. Just going to put it right here for today's video and we'll play around more with it later, you could add different angles from the back side here. You could shoot underneath. Have it underneath here so you don't see anything out front, but i thought it would be kind of a cool perspective to put it up front here and just see a little bit of the plane while we're flying it is 1080p video and it is super stabilized. You can check out the link for this one down below, but what's cool about the drift. Well, let's just get right into this review. The drift is one of those super modular planes. It comes apart really quickly. If you want to hike with this, you could do it put it in a backpack and have this carbon fiber tail boom hanging out the top of your backpack or completely break it down by undoing this little piece right here comes off and then the tail completely Slides out, which i'm not going to take it all the way off, because it's hooked into the servo.
There is a rod that travels inside this carbon spar to that tail right there. And if you want to take this off, you just undo this little tail hitch right here. This pin and this clip and you'll you'll be ready to go so as long as it's sitting in there straight put that back on and it does not have a rudder. So there's no rudder on here you guys there's only elevator and ailerons and your motor, so three channel plane. You can also add gps on here, which i did this is the zod copilot it's around forty dollars, or so i think, it's thirty nine dollars, one of the easiest quickest, no solder flight controller. With stabilization and gps return to home, you can do geo fencing. You can do return to home on signal loss, all kinds of really cool stuff in this flight controller, and it fits perfectly in here because zod decided to make us a bay for copilot. So this is pretty much made for co pilot, which is awesome, because i keep telling guys at the airfield to use copilot on any rc plane. You would like to put it on just make sure your gps is somewhere in the middle of your cg here. Doesn'T have to be, it can be out here on the wing if you want, but to keep everything relative to the flight controller and everything we put it here and it performed good right there generally.
Sometimes you want to keep your gps away from the rf as far out as you can from your video transmitter, but i have my video transmitter riding all the way in the front. That is the vc 400, but it is an aio, camera and what's cool about this is that up inside here we have this xt30 for the regular power, and then we have a jst in here all ready to go from zod you just plug in the vc 400 right here – and this is everything the transmitter – the camera – everything plugs right in through the main power it can take up to a 3s battery. No problem and the front end of the plane already has venting in the front, and it is molded to accept the vc400 just like this, and what i thought was also really cool is there's, even a notch, right here in the very front that this camera can Slide into right out the front right there didn't have to cut anything. You could put a little couple dabs of hot glue on the back side of this, so it absolutely doesn't move. But for my demos i just left it right there and we flew it just how it is sitting and it didn't move at all now battery choice on this little guy. We can use a two or three s battery and what you need to know about this setup is that you do get two props in the box.
You get this little tiny. Three inch tri blade prop right here, and this is going to be a pusher setup. You can see it set up on this tripod. This is a 1406 motor with 2600 kv. Now that is your 3s prop. You will use a bigger prop for 2s. If you want and it's very smooth, it is a 5 blade prop, and this is a 5 inch prop, so you can put this one on the back if you're using 2s use this one for 3s and speaking of 2 and 3s, i thought that this motor Looked very very similar to a motor had already flown from the zod family. So no not my all time, favorite orbit, which is here. This is one of my favorite fpv wings of all time. It has the probably one of the best glide ratios i've ever flown, and you can get up to 25 minutes flight time on this one. You can also get around 20 minutes flight time with this and something like a 3s 850 milliamp battery. If you want to do that, you can also go up to a 1000 milliamp battery in this battery bay as well um, but both of these motors check them out. They both have the same motor on here. This is the dart 250g and they both have the same exact prop so both 1406 motors and they're, both sunny sky branded motors, so what's nice about both of these too, is that they are fairly low kv at 2600, but it has plenty of high end power.
If you really want to make this guy go fast on 3s, it will actually go pretty fast. If you decide to run the 5 inch prop, it will go ultra fast, but you, you might be stressing out uh this entire sort of mount right here. It is fairly fairly stiff feeling, but i have a feeling that there's, a nice carbon fiber uh mount or abs mount coming up through here to mount that motor it feels pretty stiff. But when you're tightening up the prop. Also, you want to be very careful that you don't break this motor mount stem, because you have to hold this motor quite tight to be able to tighten up this prop nut. So beginners be aware of that you can break this down super super small and now let me go ahead and take the wings off. We have one servo here. This looks to be somewhere around like a seven kilogram servo. I might be wrong, but super short little control rods there and what looks like either carbon fiber or glass fiber throw push rods, which is cool, also plenty of carbon fiber spars in here, and i also noticed that they even have carbon fiber spars inside the fuselage. In the front here for a little bit of extra stiffening up of the front end. So if you have a frontal crash, it's not likely to accordion the whole thing, because you have that extra bracing in here on both sides, which is really really nice.
And i love the fact that they use these little plugins right here. There'S three pins right here and three pins on this side, so that plugs in your servos. So no wires are hanging off the side and i just kind of put my xm plus on the side right there plugged it into the copilot, and so now i have a complete flight controller system with no soldering needed and fpb camera it's kind of crazy that You can get an fpv camera and everything you need to fly. A flight controller fpv with no soldering super duper easy and that's what's great about sod. Personally, i think they're, some of the easiest and actually most cost effective, different types of planes. You can get out there starting out with the orbit one of my all time, favorites the zod 250 g, if you're looking for something kind of small and super portable, that was awesome around the same price as the sod drift and that's all there is to it. Just putting the wing back on really simple and i love all these access canopies and they use magnets on everything top and bottom, and now the drift is ready to go so let's go ahead outside now, guys let's get this up in the air and let's see What i think about it and what my alter ego ghosty thinks about it here we go all right, guys, it's time for the zod drift flight tests and let's go ahead and get it up in the air.
This is my first flight with my insta 360. Go on the nose of the plane and a little bit of purposing right away, as you can tell, but my expo was not set in. It was a hundred percent uh manual on that plus i didn't use any stabilization, so that's the characteristic you're going to get. If you don't put any expo or any travel limits in your servos now up at the top left hand, part of the screen, you can see the fpv view. That is the ac400 right now. You can see that i'm on channel a4 5805. The next number over is 200 i'm running 200 milliwatt. If you long press the button on that aio camera, it will actually change power um. I think you have to press it for about 10 seconds, or so you can also see battery voltage, which is cool. It is 11.7 um. I have had the plane on for a few minutes already, but i'm only running a a 3s 450 right here um. So it is an older one, it's a little weaker. So i do have some battery sag immediately after launch, but once you get up and you get to a cruise level, you can still get like uh, probably around five minutes flight time with a 450 but that's the lightest battery. I would probably use you want to push it all the way to the front of the plane for the proper cg with the insta 360 go on there.
So one thing to think about, if you're going to use this type of setup, but if you're running all the way up to a 1000 or even the 850 you're going to move it back a little bit on the bottom of the wing. There are two notches and that is going to be where you balance out the cg and that's going to be your lateral or your front to back cg, lateral cg would be something different, but pretty cool because check this out. I can come in and land in the grass and on 3s i can take back off out of the grass with it that's pretty fun. If you've ever done that with a plane, uh it's, always nice, you can do a little touch and goes just kind of land on the belly of the plane and keep going really a lot of fun. But once i backed off the throttle, i think my throttle guys was somewhere around 35 25 to 35 and it's quite snappy. The roll rate is really really nice. It said in the manual don't do a lot of aerobatics. This is a sail. Plane may cause failure, but i'll leave that up to you guys whether you want to do airbags or not. You do take chances when you're doing aerobatics so, but i wanted to see what this plane could do for you guys. So i wanted to dive it flip. It roll it loop it i even tried an outside loop, which is kind of crazy for this plane, but it has such a massive travel, throw on all of the surfaces that i figured that i could get away with it and it's just ultra light and way.
Smaller than a full sized sail plane, i wouldn't be trying an outside loop with most of my sail planes, but this one would actually do it, which is kind of crazy, and we get an unexpected durability test right into the pole right there and good news is That the plane came out of that crash in one piece: it didn't even dent the front of the plane, mainly because it's so light it just kind of bounced, which is really nice, so now you're watching the plane with more expo in it. This is after adding like 35 percent expo um. You could even almost add 40 at this point. If you want, you know really smooth things out so now, it's flying way way better, and this is where you're going to get that nice cruise characteristic, it would have been nice um. They probably could have even used a little smaller servo on this plane and saved a little more weight. I feel like the servos might be just a little bit big for the plane, but then again most sail planes use pretty high quality servos. So maybe they wanted to just use something a little more aggressive, but i feel like the plane really doesn't need a very big servo. I feel like they could even probably got away with like a five kilogram servo on here, but now i'm able to kind of get in there, and this is the big test out in this particular field – is going down this road right here i like to see How low i can get there's, not a whole lot of wind, but it felt a little squirrely at times coming through trying to avoid the trees.
But i was able to make it through there and i would say it: doesn't have the same type of glide as like the zod orbit. This auto might have a little bit of better glide characteristic because it has much larger wing, but it's really fun to send this one way up in the air. And if you did have a little bit of a headwind guys you, you can do a lot of gliding with this glider, especially if you decide to lighten up the battery, you might even equal out your flight time. If you went a little lighter battery with a little bit of wind, a little bit of headwinds will really keep this plane up in the air for a long time. It'S just so neat that it's so portable and down on the runway. Nice really nice flights, especially now that it's all uh, trimmed out with some servo trim on here some some limit. Now we have limits on the travel and a little bit of expo, and here i was playing around. I wanted to show you guys just uh how slow you can get this plane and i'm, not sure a lot of other reviewers kind of showed you proximity fpv with this plane, but i wanted to just really get in there and show you how much control i Have and i'm still kind of figuring out the throttle a little bit once you do that you find out where the plane's stall characteristics are.
You can get away with a lot of stuff, so it seems to have a it seems to like to have a pretty good amount of speed in the in the front of the plane, because it will it does this nose dip thing and that again, that might Be the surfaces my elevator again has a little too much throw, but once i figure that out, i can really get in there, and i did several crashes out in this field and i have to say this plane is scoring really high with me on the durability Factor so durability is really good. The performance is amazing. If you want to do aerobatics, they also get two thumbs up for the modular side of things, it's, a really modular design. You can take it all apart, really quickly by hand, no tools needed and no soldering for an entire fpv system with gps is just unbelievable, and still you can get all your telemetry on the screen here and i wanted to just show you guys a good flight. So that you can see what the bc 400 camera looks like and also the telemetry on screen now we're going to try a tree dive. Typically, only do this with a quad, but here we go not too bad able to pull out just fine, and i don't know that i've ever done that with a lot of other planes. I definitely don't do that with 60 inch wings, but this little guy you can just about do anything with.
I almost caught a branch right there really really quick, quick plane with a lot. It has a lot of speed to it. If you really want to go fast, you really can, and you can see i could add, even a little more expo in there – probably bring it up to 40 expo but depending on what radio you have. Also, if you guys are flying spectrum, you might be putting in a little less expo, but travel limit will do a lot. You could probably stick to 35 uh expo and then you know start out with 20 travel limit, nice, nice, loop and there's a little bit of inverted and there's that outside loop trying for it almost got it. It wants to kind of bring itself right side back right side up, which is a good characteristic and most times when you're flying a pusher plane, that's kind of what happens when you try outside loops with a pusher. They kind of like spin themselves back around it's. Like a cat getting back to their feet, always landing on their feet, whether they come in upside down or right side up, but now it's flying nice. And if you want a sunday flat, you can it's a really nice easy going plane super super fun and for the price, it's kind of it's kind of hard to beat for this price, a lot of fun. A quick little dive here. Getting some big speed off the end of the runway, so let's go back to the studio and get some final thoughts guys all right guys welcome back from the flights now that went about as as good as i would expect it would, because it flew great once I got it up in the air.
My first toss, i did notice a bunch of porpoising and i noticed that painless, 360 and some other guys have that same type of thing going on and it's, because the surfaces on here are quite large for the aircraft. The ailerons are well over an inch on each side and the the elevator back here is probably a little over a half inch, but the amount of throw that was set in here for 100. Throw was a lot, so it maxed out quite a bit with these servos. The servo arms are pretty short, but it pushes way out there on each surface. So what i want to recommend, for you guys, is put about 35 expo in there for manual flying if you're flying this manual without the co pilot, give do yourself a favor and go ahead and give 35 expo on each of the surfaces. The elevator and the aileron you don't have to worry about the stabilizer in the back, so you don't have a rudder, but that will definitely help soften things up and you can put about 20 travel limit on each of the surfaces as well, and that'll also help Slow it down a little bit, but if you want it to be super snappy and do a really tight loop, uh full travel on here is quite aggressive and it feels more like a stunt plane on 3s when you're doing that. So keep that in mind, if you want to slow cruise fly this on a 2s battery with the 5 inch crop, the buy blade that came with it and you could get some really nice cinematic type flying if you're, just a cruiser or sunday flyer or somebody New start out with 2s and this larger problem, this is the combo to go with so 3s will be for more advanced flying.
If you want to fly a little bit faster on 3s and 3s 850 again, you get like 20 to 22 minutes, just cruising with a 3s 850 and even maybe get 25 or more minutes with a 1 000 milliamp pack. So i'll put some links down below for all the batteries suggestions, uh. Also extra props and i'll put a link to the 250g as well, because this is also one of my favorite zod planes of all time. Um – and i have a lot of favorites now and it seems like zod just keeps pumping out the releases, but they keep coming out with things that are totally different than the last release, which is nice because they're kind of covering all sides of our community. What we, what we all seem to want so now we have a miniature glider and how cool is that zod drift is really really fun and you don't have to worry about breaking the prop it's up here. If you break that prop in the back you're doing something totally crazy guys but i'm uh really happy with it, and i think that um, if you want to get one, if you can get one go ahead and grab the link down below, because i think these Are going to sell out pretty quick, a really fun and versatile plane flight controller or no flight controller? However, you decide to fly it. This will be a lot of fun for this summer, so you want to choose those days carefully when you're going to fly this plane, no wind at all light wind day, maybe 10 miles an hour at the most for this little guy.
Unless you really really want to see it, go fly away, be very careful with the drift thanks again for watching my channel guys, i'm justin davis.
