Review: GDU Byrd Advanced

I'll confess I was slightly confused when a GDU drone showed up at my door last month. I had never heard of this company, and it's rare that a new drone maker slips past my radar. A quick trip to the internet set me straight: GDU is the new name of ProDrone, which unveiled the Byrd to much fanfare at the last CES.

The drone that arrived at my door was the company's new Byrd Advanced. The Byrd Standard, which launched earlier this year, has a built-in camera with lower-end specs. The Byrd Advanced ($850) ditches the built-in camera in favor of a gimbal made to hold a GoPro. It fits the Hero4 and the new Hero5, neither of which are included, but the BYO-camera design is welcome. GDU's drone uses fully interchangeable gimbals, so you can swap in another gimbal (which you buy as an accessory) to hold another camera like a Sony Alpha DLSR or RX100. But the gimbal that comes in the box fits a GoPro.

Fully collapsed, the Byrd is surprisingly compact—small enough to shove into a backpack—and it comes with a nice, well-padded carrying case for the gimbal and your camera (which, again, you supply yourself). Having damaged gimbals trying to put two different drones back in their all-in-one carrying cases, I really appreciated the separate case just for the camera assembly. The collapsible design does mean it takes longer to get everything set up and ready to fly, but with practice, you can get it down to just a couple of minutes.

Flying the Byrd is more or less the same as flying any other drone with a two-joystick controller and POV video feed. Anyone who's flown a Phantom will be able to use GDU's controller without much thought at all. I suppose you could argue that GDU is copying DJI, but I for one welcome the copying. There's nothing I'd like more than for every drone controller handset to have the same buttons with the same functions in the same places—standardization is good because the muscle memory makes you a better pilot.

One place the Byrd's controller differs is the control wheels for panning the camera. Unlike a lot of drones, the Byrd can point the camera independent of the direction of flight. This makes it possible to get some shots you would otherwise miss, though it also means you can end up with the landing gear in your shot. This is one of the reasons that higher-priced drones (which typically can pan independent of flight direction) offer retractable landing gear. It's possible to get some unique shots without getting the landing gear in them, but the lack of collapsible landing gear does limit the usefulness of this feature.

The Byrd is a real pleasure to fly. It's not quite as snappy or fast as the Phantom 4, but it's more responsive than the Typhoon H. More importantly though it's fun to fly and it responds faithfully to your commands, which affords a trustworthiness that's sometimes more important than actual performance.

The only time the Byrd broke that sense of trust was the live video feed, which hung up twice when I was testing it. Both times I was testing with an older 2nd-generation iPad, which may be the source of the problem since I had no similar problems on my Android phone. The phone feed was small, but still useable.

How it handles obviously depends somewhat on weather conditions, but I found that when the GPS signal is strong the Byrd has no trouble staying locked in place in hover mode. Due to drone restrictions at local parks and the number of trees in my area, I wasn't able to test the follow feature among the urban greenery, but the Byrd had no trouble tracking me as I ran down the street.

Other automated flight features include automatic takeoff and landing via the Home button, both of which work well. It is nice to be able to call the drone home with a press of a button, but there doesn't appear to be a way to cancel the return home feature once you've engaged it. The return home feature also works should you fly out of range (the Byrd will turn around and fly home) or run low on battery.

The Byrd's battery is massive and heavy, but it does indeed manage to deliver on Byrd's claimed 30 minutes of flight time. Actual times will depend on many factors—shoot video continuously while flying in to a 20 mph headwind and you'll be back before 30 minutes. When I flew it in average, not-too-windy conditions, it stayed aloft for 27 minutes.

I've been testing drones for two years now and have flown dozens of models from nearly as many manufacturers. What I've been hoping to see for some time is what amounts to the travel photographer's dream: a lightweight, small package that still offers high quality video and stills, but with the flight stability of larger models. The Byrd isn't perfect, but it gets closer to fulfilling that dream than anything else I've tested to date.