How To Get A Drone Out Of A Tree!

I am really enjoying flying drones lately. I thought my son might like it but it turns out I got the bug. However, after a few test flights I learned a valuable lesson or two.

Before I get into how to get a drone out of a tree let me give you a little background a maybe a tip or two on flying drones.

Drones can also be called quad copters because many of the most popular drones on the market have four rotors.

The drone I nearly lost permanently in a tree is pictured here. It's a Syma. But the first drone I purchased was a Hubsan. It is small and you can fly it in your home and chase your kids with it (but be careful). Make sure you put the blade protectors on if you are going to fly it near people, and get confident with it as well because the blades can leave a mark and scare your little children. My son loves to be chased by it.

The Hubson was a good training drone and it's still a lot of fun. So I moved up a step and purchased the Soma X5c drone which is about four times larger.

Here's how I got it stuck in a tall tree. I was flying it in my backyard where there is a little bit of room to have fun with it, especially if you fly it low. But I wanted to test out the video capability of the drone and fly it really high and get some areal views.

It felt a little difficult to control way up above the trees. And because there was a slight breeze up there it would drift. But I brought it up quite high and then brought it down without any problems, at first.

On the third go it drifted a little too much, and I think the batteries weren't as strong because when I released the power and then increased the power it would not go straight up like it normally would and as a result it landed right near the top of a big tree outside of our fence.

It is then that it dawned on me that flying a drone near large trees may not be a great idea if you are not very good at it yet because once it gets into the branches, it's stuck quite well. And in this case it was about thirty feet in the air, and there were several branches and lots of leaves in the way. You could barely see the thing.

Climbing: This tree was not climbable halfway up because it got very dense with branches, so that was out. Even my eight your old son would not make it, and I wouldn't let him climb it anyway because it was way too high.

Shaking: Shaking the tree was not an option because it was too large and the limb that it was near was very high and not reachable.

Poking: The only option that seemed viable at first was to find something that I could poke it with. But what? It had to be a twenty foot pole. Fortunately was able to find three long sticks and nail them together, making a twenty foot poking stick.

I spent about thirty minutes getting it through the branches in order to poke it loose. I was able to poke it a few times, just barely, and then it fell to a more difficult area on the tree. At this point I gave up because I could not think of any other options, and like a moron I wasn't wearing gloves so I spent ten minutes getting splinters out of my hands.

Bow and Arrow: I researched ideas on how to get a drone out of a tree and someone said they were going to try using a bow and arrow with a string. This was the only other option I considered. But then I would have to buy a bow, and then If I did hit the drone in the tree I might break it. Plus, if I missed I risked hitting someone or tangling the string. So I dropped that option.

Throwing A Ball or Object: This is a viable alternative but the drone was too high up and lodged too well in the tree. See the picture below. You can just see one of the red blades if you look closely.

Fortunately I married someone smarter than me. My wife didn't want to leave the drone in the tree. So she actually tried to climb it herself against my wishes. She tried and was not able to get anywhere near the drone or shake the branch (which wouldn't work anyway because the propellers and propeller guards are good for branches to stick through and keep hold of it).

So she went over to the neighbors and got an extendable tree pruner to cut my way to a better path to the drone. At first I didn't think it would work. But she insisted I try. So I got on the ladder and started sawing away branches (which we wanted to do anyway to get more light into our yard).

After sawing off four big branches I was able to clear a better path directly to the drone for my long poking stick. And that is what worked! I was able to poke it down and grab it with the pruner as it got stuck in the tree next to it.

Problem solved!

I then went bananas with the tree pruner and lobbed off a lot of branches on three other trees. So I accomplished two things with the pruner that day. I was able to get the drone out of the tree, and I was able to bring more light into our yard and get a better view.