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You’ll never forget the first time you fly a drone over water.
No matter how well it flies or how good its safety features are, there’s still the worry of your expensive quadcopter diving into the lake or surfing.
So, even though the new HoverAir Aqua drone is designed specifically for water, I was still hesitant about the implications of a flying camera meeting liquid.
Then I threw it into the sea in the drink.
A drone to capture your wonderful moments
The HoverAir Aqua is designed to follow you on the water, whether you’re surfing, kayaking, canoeing, or participating in any other activity where you want to capture up-close action. It can autonomously follow your movements using a variety of modes – the idea is that you fly it in the air, focus your attention on your activity, and leave the rest to the drone. It does not operate underwater, although its camera can record what is happening below it before it takes off.
The HoverAir Aqua is priced at $1,299, with an important caveat revealed the day before its release: it is not yet available in the US due to “current administrative and regulatory complexities in the US.” However, the drone can be ordered and shipped to 50 other countries.
The HoverAir Aqua drone and its accompanying Lighthouse wearable component.
The Aqua system consists of two parts – a drone and a smart target to track. The quadcopter itself weighs 249 grams, just under the limit for FAA registration, and has two foam guards on each side to provide lightweight flotation. The battery takes up most of the top, as well as the 1.6-inch full-colour AMOLED display where you can choose modes and settings and can even review the shots you’ve just taken. A row of buttons at the bottom of the screen provides access to these features.
The other component is the beacon, a chunky orange transmitter that you wear on your arm or leg that gives you limited control and acts as a target for the drone due to its many tracking modes. After the drone and beacon establish a radio connection, press the main button to launch the helicopter. Pressing the second button brings it back. While the drone is in the air, there are four directional buttons that vertically push it up and down or rotate it left and right.
Naturally, the drone and beacon are waterproof, with an IP-67 rating. You should make sure that the charging port on the bottom of the drone has the silicone plug in place and that the battery is securely attached. This is, after all, still an electronic device that spends most of its time getting wet.
The Aqua I received came with three batteries, as well as two separate waterproof dry bag style bags with double ziplock fasteners to carry the new batteries with you (I put them in a large pocket of my life jacket). The standalone charger, which is not waterproof, powers two batteries at once using a USB-C cable.
The HoverAir Aqua batteries also come with a charger (middle left) and individual waterproof cases.
The Aqua can also operate as a traditional drone through the Hover app on your phone via a special mode that offers virtual controls. This gives you more control over where the camera points and lets you select a target to follow rather than letting the onboard software make that choice.
And because the camera can rotate 90 degrees face down, you can record what’s happening underwater when the Aqua bobs on the surface.
Flying a HoverAir Aqua
To test the Aqua, I went kayaking at a marina near where I live in Seattle. Throwing the drone into the water the first time was a really nervous moment, but once it got wet and didn’t disappear into the depths, my old fears subsided.
After a few seconds, the drone and beacon established a connection and the drone locked into OmniTerrain mode (which is used for flying over water). Then I pressed the central button on the lighthouse to launch the helicopter into the air. It’s noisy and choppy, as you can imagine with four little rotors cutting through the water.
With most drones, this will be the last thing you see. The HoverAir Aqua is sitting and waiting to fly.
Both units announce what they are doing using a loud, cheerful female voice and several unique audible tones to indicate different alerts. When you launch the drone, it provides a 3-second countdown and warns you if you are too close. Once the drone is airborne and pointed at you, the beacon tells you when it starts recording video.
One of the best features is the Turtle Flip: If the drone is upside down in the water (or if a certain person in a kayak gladly tosses it upside down), the Aqua automatically flips itself over. This wasn’t an issue in the relatively calm waters I was paddling in, but I imagine moderate surf could easily tip the lightweight drone over. Turtle Flip means you won’t have to paddle or swim again to put it in position.
The HoverAir Aqua hovers near my kayak.
In fact, Aqua does a good job of handling most of the work. Other drones require extensive piloting with your hands and attention — the Aqua, on the other hand, will launch into the air and follow you based on the mode you’ve selected, leaving you free to do your own thing.
I mostly used the kayak position, which generally kept me in frame while paddling, usually from behind. You can choose whether the drone maintains a near, medium, or far distance, or select a specific distance. The Aqua rates hover at up to 34 mph (55 km/h), which I haven’t been able to test in my smaller kayak.
I also tried other modes, like Zoom Out, which backs up and turns away from the subject, Orbit Follow, which makes the drone fly in lazy circles, and Spiral, which combines the two. There are also SUP (stand up paddle) modes and traditional camera angles, such as Dolly Track and Angle Track. Each one has options you can configure using the screen on the drone, such as whether it should follow you from a high vantage point at a moderate distance.
The HoverAir Aqua is at home on the water (here it’s about to be tossed around).
For the most part, using the Aqua was smooth, but I did experience some stuttering. To land the drone, press the RTH (Return to Home) button on the beacon: it flies close to you and then lands 15 seconds later. This also stops video recording. However, several times I would connect to it and it would keep hanging in the sky, burning up battery power.
As a quick way to end the flight, you can grab the top of the drone and quickly flip it over. But when I was sitting at water level in the kayak, the drone was usually out of my reach.
You also have to keep in mind that the fan guards are made of lightweight foam. I broke one while testing in my backyard when it hit a fence, a reminder that the drone has a downward-pointing sensor and its own camera, but no other way to avoid collisions. Fortunately, it comes with a repair kit that includes a pair of guards and extra props.
I realize that the Lighthouse is designed to be as simple as possible, but I wish there were more controls, like another display and buttons like there are on the drone itself. I wish I had the ability to stop and start recording manually instead of waiting for Lighthouse, like the director, to announce when to start recording.
It’s also important to note that the drone was running beta firmware, and some known issues were communicated to Hover engineers when the drone arrived. This included the Aqua and Lighthouse’s tendency to disconnect and reconnect frequently “due to fluctuations in signal strength,” according to the company, as well as swaying movements in some modes like Orbit Follow and Dolly Tracking. I’ve faced all those issues. I have contacted the company to inquire about when these issues are expected to be resolved.
Image quality
The Aqua captures 1080p or 4K video at up to 60 fps in normal shooting mode, and up to 100 fps in slow motion mode. It can also record in H-Log format if you want to do higher quality post-process editing. The 1/1.28-inch CMOS camera can also capture 12MP still images in JPEG, DNG, or JPEG+DNG formats.
Whether you’re shooting video, photos, or a group of photos depends on the mode you’re using. Kayak mode only shoots video, for example, but Bird’s Eye (which flies straight up with the lens pointed down) gives you the option to take a photo, video, or both. (I only tested the default video modes for this hands-on experience.)
Still frame from 4K video captured with the HoverAir Aqua drone camera.
The Aqua has 128GB of internal storage, so you don’t have to worry about memory cards. During my testing, I recorded 19 short 4K videos (on and off the water), amounting to about 37 minutes of footage, and consumed 15GB. I would say that unless you have a very long day of activity and long recorded clips, starting storage will suffice. There’s no option to use external memory cards, so if storage space gets tight, you’ll need to offload clips to your phone from time to time.
In my limited testing, I can’t say this will replicate the kind of choreographed shots you can get from an experienced drone pilot flying them separately. You leave that kind of control to the drone itself, and it does a fair job. It’s also not entirely smooth in its movements, even in modes other than those the company alerted me to, and it often moves jerkily to re-center me in the frame.
As for video quality, it does a perfectly fine job at default settings. During the sunny day I was outside, the car handled turns into the sun great and it didn’t blow. The lens is “self-heating, anti-fog, and (contains) a hydrophobic nanocoating,” according to the press materials, but some of my clips had water stained on the lens, so I think results will vary.
Some of the videos I shot looked like this because of water on the HoverAir Aqua lens.
However, overall, the HoverAir Aqua is noteworthy for what other jets can’t do: play alongside you in the water without worrying that a single mistake or bad luck could sink your expensive gadget.
Now I just want to remember that when I fly my regular drone, it’s not waterproof like this one.
