Flight plans?

[mickyacandal]

How many of you create flight plans, especially before going in flying in a new area? Or flying with the intent on capturing a specific shot? I’m not talking about auto pilot or anything like that where you create a flight plan and your drone flies automatically, I’m more talking about looking at maps and satellite footage before your flight to try and pre-determine the path you want to fly and any areas you want to avoid. so far I’ve only been flying small test flights so I haven’t had a need for any planning, but this weekend I’m going up to the mountains to take some photos and I think having a flight plan or at least just a good awareness of what’s around me, peak elevations and whatnot might be a good idea. Which brings me to My main question. For those of you who do you have experience in planning your flights ahead of time, what do you use to do so? Is there a good android or iOS app? Or do you just spend some time looking at satellite footage? And if the latter is the case, and you do see something to avoid, how do you go about doing so? Do you just have to manually be aware of what’s where, or is there an app or something that you can program to let you know when you’re getting close to areas you want to stay away from? Or even better something that’s shows the path of my plan on a map or something while flying?

This line of questioning also brings up another somewhat unrelated question. Switching apps while in flight. Do you do it? Big no no? For example I’m flying (with RC) and I want to take a look at something on AirMap or whatever so I stop flying and hover in place (making sure I have a good gps lock so it doesn’t go anywhere) then switch out of the DJI go 4 app into airmap then back to dji go 4 again to resume flying when I’m done.