Too good to be true?

If you’ve spent any time on social media of late, you’ve probably had an ad for the HOVERAir X1 Pro Max buzz across your feed. On paper, it’s the natural evolution of the GoPro effect, it allows footage-obsessed riders to jump from first person POV videos to third person autonomous drone follow cams with very little effort.

My affair with the HOVERAir X1 was brief and tempestous. It started out with some skepticism at too-good-to-be-true advertisements on Instagram, evolved to genuine amazement at the drone’s capabilities, and, spoiler alert, culminated with the drone flying far, far away from me and never coming back. So let’s dive into the good, the bad, and the lost of the HOVERAir X1

HOVERAir X1 Pro Max Details

• Video resolution: Up to 8K/30 FPS
• Top Speed: 37 MPH
• Weight: 192.8 g
• MSRP: $699

What is the HOVERAir X1 Pro Max supposed to do?

Big picture, the HOVERAir is meant to stand in for a videographer. It’s an autonomous drone that can be programmed to follow and record you, or do one of several pre-programmed camera movements around you. It uses a swath of sensors and software to identify the subject of its videos, and then chase it around. It’s worth just pausing to marvel at this for a moment. It wasn’t too long ago that a GoPro recording 720p was a big deal. Now for under a grand you can get a flying camera that doesn’t require a pilot and shoots 8K video footage. What a world!

I’m not going to break down all of the HOVERAir X1 Pro Max’s features and options in this piece, because that would turn into a novel. Instead, the premise is very simple: it’s a very durable, very packable drone that you can pull out of your riding pack, unfold, push one button, and then, hypothetically, ride like normal while your every move is recorded by your friendly flying companion.

Again, hypothetically this should allow you to create engaging, watchable footage of you riding your bike, without any outside help. Given how much mountain bike culture seems to be fragmenting into “everybody’s an influencer/youtuber/personality who talks to the camera about riding instead of just riding” that value proposition is enticing.

Additionally, you can control it via a phone app, or with the optional Beacon and Joysticks combo. 

HOVERAir Beacon and Joysticks

Because the idea of becoming an MTB influencer makes me nauseous, I requested that HOVERAir send over their Beacon and Joysticks combo. This is one of the most clever swiss army knife gadgets I’ve seen. It consists of three parts (two joystick pods and one screen pod) that all snap together with satisfying magnetic interfaces, and it can be used in four different ways.

First, with both joysticks attached, you can plug in your phone and have a fairly traditional drone flying experience. Or, you can use both joysticks without your phone and have the same experience with the small built-in screen. But, you can also pop off one joystick, and hold the combo in one hand, similar to a Nintendo Wii remote. This allows you to fly the drone using a combination of the one joystick, a trigger, and accelerometer-controlled gestures.

Finally, you can use just the Beacon with its built in arrow pad and buttons to fly the drone.

And, if you don’t want to be in control, you can just clip the Beacon to your pack and use it as a preview screen, and let the built-in mic automatically record any deep thoughts you might spew as you ride to the drone’s video track. Again, this remote system is very cool. It packs so much functionality into a tiny package with good haptics that’s satisfying to use. It’s impossible to play with this without being impressed.

That said, it’s very obvious that the HOVERAir X1 Pro Max was designed primarily to be an autonomous drone. While the controller works very well, the drone itself isn’t nearly as quick and responsive when being flow via the controller as it is when it’s automatically following a subject. It feels like it’s got training wheels on, to keep the human controller from making mistakes.

Real-world HOVERAir X1 Pro Max riding experience

I was skeptical when I unboxed the HOVERAir X1 Pro Max. It makes a lot of claims that seemed hard to back up. And then I pushed the button on the top, and immediately it was buzzing around the office, following me as I impressed coworkers with its manouverability. Of every product and gadget I’ve played with in the last few years, this was the one thing that immediately made me feel like I was living in the future. In a controlled, low-paced environment, this thing is absolutely absurd. It’s so easy to use, the video is so well stabilized and looks so nice, it’s mind-boggling.

And, when I experimented with riding my bike around the parking lot, weaving around bushes, and the like, the HOVERAir continued to impress. It kept pace easily, didn’t run into cars, and produced great footage. But, when I tried to have it follow me through an open door, it got a little confused and hesitated. I had to come out and coax it in, almost like convincing a skittish puppy that entering a scary building was ok.

That’s the analogy that’s stuck with me in my experience with the HOVERAir X1. It’s very much like riding with a dog. Sometimes it does a great job, and blows you away with how easy it is to be around. Sometimes it gets a little overwhelmed and confused and needs some extra help to do its thing. And sometimes, well, sometimes it spooks, runs off into the woods, and you spend hours trying to find it.

In a simple environment like a pumptrack, or when climbing up a treeless section of trail, the HOVERAir does an excellent job of avoiding obstacles, keeping you in frame, and gathering sick footage. But as soon as you speed up, or there are multiple riders, or there are trees, or steep sections, or tight turns, or jumps, or, you know, any of the things that make mountain biking actually fun, it starts getting overwhelmed and its movements become unpredictable.

If you ride too fast it gets confused and stops and tries to find you again. If you disappear behind some trees or off a drop, the same things happens. If you meet another rider, it’s a coin toss on who the drone will start following.

The upshot of all of that is that I found the HOVERAir to be quite limited in its utility. If you’re hitting a one-off jump with no tight turns into it, and minimal trees, you can get great footage. But anything more complicated than that and you’re probably going to go back up and convince you dog, I mean drone, to come back to you. I tried the HOVERAir both with and without the beacon, and these results remained consistent either way.

Lassie, come home!

Again, all of my experience with the HOVERAir reminded me of teaching a dog how to go on bike rides. “No, you can’t just cut all the corners.” “No, if you stop and smell all the plants I’ll just ride away from you and then you’ll be lost and confused.” “No, you’ve got to get out of the way immediately when folks are riding behind you.” It’s a rather distracting and exhausting process.

But, I trusted the process and eventually I thought I’d found the perfect situation to capture some cool footage with the HOVERAir. Minimal trees, no turns, just a wide open chute with a couple of small drops and huge, fast runnout. So I unfolded the HOVERAir, made sure the beacon was on in my pocket, pushed the button, and dropped in. According to my friends the drone followed me for maybe twenty yards. As soon as I landed the third drop, and accelerated down the apron, the HOVERAir got…confused. It stopped following me and flew straight up, so high that we lost visual contact with it.

I realized it was lost and pulled out the Beacon to try to manually override it and bring it home. Instead, I was assaulted with a barrage of notifications that completely flooded the screen and made it impossible to navigate. I got warnings that the drone had lost me, that it was flying too high, that I was losing signal, that the battery was low. And I couldn’t cancel these warnings and see where it actually was. This was quite stressful.

Eventually I cleared enough of the notifications that I could see what the drone was doing just in time to watch as the HOVERAir wandered over to a large clump of trees and buzzed directly into the canopy. 

The HOVERAir has a built-in beacon that works with the Find My network to allow you to track it if you lose it. Unfortunately, that beacon is powered by the main battery, and in any kind of violent crash, that battery falls out, leaving the drone untrackable.

About five years ago, I was riding an unfamiliar trail network with my dog when she decided to cut all the switchbacks and drop straight into a drainage. Unfortunately, the drainage she dove into was not the drainage the trail actually ended in. So I had to ride back up calling her, until I heard barking in the distance.

I was reminded of this experience as I bushwacked about, searching for the drone. The only difference was that it couldn’t bark. If I didn’t find it on the first day, I couldn’t leave out some food and items of my clothing to lure it back. Instead, it was doomed to become just another piece of e-waste in the woods.

Don’t bring your puppy to the trails.

Even at its best, if it did a great job of following riders automatically on any trail, the HOVERAir X1 Pro Max is still an imposition on other trail riders in almost exactly the same way that bringing your “trail dog” on a group ride is. It takes away from your engagement with the group experience in exactly the same way. You’re stressing about the little minion that’s supposed to be following you around, instead of focusing on the point, riding your dang bike.

The same thing goes for rules and regulations. There are some places you are not allowed to take your dog. There are many places that you are not allowed to take a drone. The HOVERAir is small and light enough that you don’t need a license to fly it in the US, with one big caveat: those flights need to be recreational, not commercial. If you’re using it commercially, you need to license it with the FAA. And yes, in this world of microinfluencers and sponsored content, the line between recreation and commerce is constantly blurring. But if you’re listing sponsors in your bio, and using the HOVERAir to drive engagement with your page, there’s an argument to be made that that counts as commercial use. Hell, there’s an argument to be made that flying the HOVERAir to review it for my job at Freehub also counts as commercial use.

But on a smaller scale, the same problems hold true. I’m the oldest of seven children, and my mother used to counter some requests with “Well, what if all of you did that, would the world still function?” That’s exactly how I feel about the HOVERAir. If one or two people on the trails are using it, it’s annoying, but not the end of the world. But if everybody was wandering around with one of these trying to follow them, well, that’s a version of mountain biking I don’t want to imagine, let alone participate in.

What if everybody brought their poorly-trained, reactive dogs on every ride? I’ve lived that nightmare in Teton Valley every April, and I don’t want to revisit it with drones.

Who is the HOVERAir X1 actually for?

All editorializing aside, I think the HOVERAir X1 Pro Max has plenty of promise, and at its current capability level makes sense in terms of shooting B-roll and cutaway footage for professional content creators. Think orbiting shots of a rider standing with their bike, or mellow flow trail or pump track follow cams. It brings a new dimension without being much more of a hassle than shooting POV footage. Just make sure that you’re licensed if you’re using it commercially, and that you do your best to make as little of an impact as possible on the riders around you.

I love riding my bike with my dog, but there’s a time, a place, and a level of consent from my group that’s required to make it work. The same goes for the HOVERAir X1 Pro Max. And there’s a risk of leaving its electronic corpse lost in the woods if you mess up, which is less than ideal.