Flying Dream Higher with my DJI Drone WingWind — A Tribute to National Engineers Week
Yutao He
Becoming an astronaut flying in space to make scientific discovery was my childhood dream. It was inspired by one popular science fiction at that time, Little Know-it-All Roams the Future (《小灵通漫游未来》), penned by one of my favorite authors Ye Yonglie (叶永烈). I was so deeply fascinated by the scenes of “Little know-it-All” (小灵通) traveling freely in space that I saved almost all of my pocket money to buy all sorts of electronics and model aircraft kits, making and tinkering with enormous joy, and dreaming someday I could fly just like him. Most kits were mail-ordered from Shanghai Yifeng Models (上海翼风航模商店), the only shop in China carrying the model kits during that time. A few years later during one college summer break trip in Shanghai, I paid a special visit to the store located in Nanjing Road. In spite of its plain interior design and crowded space, I worshiped it with great respect and appreciation as a scientific mecca and inspiration in my young curious mind.
When it was time for college applications, however, I took my parents’ suggestion and picked electrical engineering instead of a science major, thus chose Tsinghua over Beijing University and USTC. Coming to study in US was a wide eye-opener. But with mild acrophobia I have never dared to try such activities as extreme roller-coaster ride, Bungee, or private airplane piloting. It seemed that my childhood dream would never become a reality.
Working at JPL more or less settles down my dream, until July 2012 when I was spending 14 days on NPU campus in Xi’an as a volunteered coach for the Sunshine Summer Camp organized by a NGO CEO Global USA to develop servant leaders of integrity among leading students in top 100 universities in China. One morning while jogging in the track field, I bumped into a student who’s dry running his radio-controlled (RC) airplane. What an encounter! It instantly revived my childhood dream: I could actually fly a RC aircraft to carry my dream!
Back in US, UAV aka drones have gained wide popularity. High-tech giants like Google and Amazon made news splashes with Project Wing and Prime Air. But DJI Innovations, a Shenzhen-based Chinese company emerged to stand out as a undisputed leader, hailed as “the Apple of the Pearl River Delta” and the founder Frank Tao Wang as “Steve Jobs of China”.
After a few months of research, I placed an order on Phantom 2 Vision+ quadcopter during 2014 Thanksgiving Black Friday. This model became popular with a few recent news: in US a Vision+ drone crashed in the Whitehouse and triggered an immediate lockdown; In China rock Star Feng Wang finally made the top headline using one Vision+ to propose to star actress Ziyi Zhang. But not until Christmas holidays did I finally have a chance to get my hands on it to enjoy its fabulous user-friendly and elegant design.
In memory of my childhood inspiration Yifeng Models (翼风航模商店), I named the flying camera WingWind (the English translation of the store’s name). Its maiden voyage embarked at Caltech, followed by a few dronies at UCLA and my home neighborhood. A video clip (http://tinyurl.com/wingwind-yh) was produced to document my small dream-come-true story out of these dronie footage with a soundtrack of the song “Fly Higher” (飞得更高) by Feng Wang, not because his marriage proposal episode, but frankly speaking, because it is one of my favorite songs that resonates with the theme.
It’s so marvelous how a set of seemingly random dots in one’s journey of life were connected amazingly to chart a clear meaningful dream-seeker trajectory. As Mark Twain once said, “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”
Farewell, Yifeng (翼风)! Hats off, DJI! Welcome, WingWind, my dream-carrier!
Edited by: Joanne Zeng
