Best Drone for Hiking: The Lightest Thing Worth Carrying Up a Hill

Here is the thing that took me an embarrassingly long time to work out. The weight printed on a drone box is not a weight you will ever carry. It is a legal figure. It exists so the manufacturer can put a class mark on the label, and it describes exactly one object: the drone, in the air, with one battery in it.

Everything else that has to come with you — the controller you cannot fly without, the spare batteries you brought because one is never enough, the case that stops a propeller snapping in your pack — is somebody else’s problem. Nobody adds it up. So I did.

What is actually in the bag

A hiking kit is four things, and only one of them is the drone:

So here is the sum, done properly, on every drone whose parts the manufacturer actually publishes: the drone, plus the controller it ships with, plus two spare batteries. Two spares, because one battery on a hill is not a flight, it is a gamble. Where a drone ships with no controller at all, that column is empty rather than estimated.

Look at the middle of that table. The Mini 5 Pro, the Flip, the Mini 4 Pro and the Antigravity A1 are all within a gram of the 250-gram line. As things you can walk with, they are 712 g, 736 g, 780 g and 1,014 g. That is a 302-gram spread between four drones with effectively the same number printed on them, and if you shop on headline weight you cannot see it.

Then look at the top of it, where the two HOVERAir models sit at 322 and 323 grams. They are not there because they are small drones — at 191.5 and 192.5 g they are heavier than a Neo. They are there because their controller column is empty. HOVERAir does not sell one for either model: you launch it off your palm, it follows you, and your phone is the screen. Strip that 320-gram object out of the sum and a middling drone becomes the lightest kit in the table above. Only the Neo 2 undercuts it, and only in the phone-only mode that is not in that table — by leaving a controller you own at the car and accepting a 60-metre ceiling, which is a decision you have to keep making. Here there is no decision, because there is nothing to leave behind. I have flown neither, so take that as judgement rather than experience — but the arithmetic is HOVERAir’s own numbers and it is not close.

What it costs you is airtime and margin. Sixteen minutes a battery is the shortest flight time on this page, the obstacle sensing only looks backwards, and the battery in the box is rated to −5 °C rather than the −10 °C every other drone in that table manages — HOVERAir sells a separate cold-weather battery and tells you to fit it below freezing. On a summer path that is a trade I would make. On a January ridge it is not.

The A1 is the extreme case, and I have not flown one, so take this as judgement rather than experience: it is a drone you fly through goggles, and the goggles plus their battery are 515 g. The control gear weighs more than twice the drone. That is a fascinating object and it is not a thing I would put in a rucksack for twelve miles.

That photograph is the whole argument in one frame. The thing in my hand is the controller. The thing on the table is the drone. The controller is the heavier object, and every buying guide on the internet writes about the one on the table.

Twelve miles, and why the last mile is the one that counts

Seven hundred grams sounds like nothing. It is nothing, in the shop. A litre of water weighs a kilogram, so the Mini 5 Pro kit is about two-thirds of a water bottle, and you would laugh at anyone who agonised over that.

Then you walk for six hours. Weight in a pack is not a fixed cost, it is a rate: you pay it every step, and the bill arrives at the end. The kit that felt trivial at the car park is the reason you do not bother getting it out on the last summit, which is usually the one with the light on it. I have watched people carry a drone all day and fly it once, at the beginning, because by mid-afternoon unpacking it had become a chore.

The test that actually matters. Not “how light is it?” but “will I still take it out at hour six?” Every gram you save is really buying you one more flight late in the day, and late in the day is when hills look their best. That is the only reason any of this arithmetic is worth doing.

Minutes per gram: the number that ranks them properly

If you accept that framing, the interesting figure is not weight and it is not flight time. It is the two divided into each other: how many minutes in the air does each gram on your back buy you?

One correction to that chart before you take it to the bank. Those flight times are all laboratory numbers and the manufacturers say so in the small print. DJI measures the Mini 3’s 38 minutes “with a flight speed of 21.6 kph in windless condition”. The Flip’s 31 minutes is a wind-tunnel figure at a constant 6 m/s; hover it instead and DJI’s own number drops to 28. There is no wind on a spec sheet and there is always wind on a ridge.

Which brings us to the thing that does more damage to those numbers than wind ever will.

The DJI Mini 5 Pro, at £689. It is the lightest thing worth carrying up a hill, and I would not spend long deciding.

That sentence is doing two jobs, and both halves matter. Lightest, because at 712 g of complete kit it undercuts every other drone here with a camera in its class — and it does that by pairing a one-inch sensor with a 71.2-gram battery, a combination nothing else here comes close to and a design decision nobody advertises and everybody feels. Worth carrying, because it is the only drone under 250 grams with a one-inch sensor, and the gap between a one-inch sensor and everything smaller is exactly the gap between a photograph of a view and a record that you were there. If the pictures matter more to you than the walking does, I have ranked the whole field on stills alone in the guide to the best drone for photography.

It is also the best-behaved of these in the conditions a hill actually produces: 12 m/s of rated wind resistance where most of the sub-250-gram field manages 10.7, and a 6,000-metre ceiling you will never approach in Britain. I have flown it, and the thing I noticed was not the camera. It was that it holds position in wind that makes a Mini 4 Pro look busy.

Spend less if you can. The DJI Flip at £295 carries 24 grams heavier as a kit, has a genuinely good 48-megapixel camera and costs less than half. If this is your first drone and the honest answer is that you want to find out whether you will actually use it on a walk, buy the Flip. Nobody has ever regretted starting cheap. If you want the whole beginner field rather than the hiking cut of it, I have ranked it in the guide to beginner drones, and the whole bracket, hiking or not, in what £500 actually buys you.

Carry almost nothing. The DJI Neo 2 at £209, flown from your phone with no controller, is 243 g of total kit. It is the only thing in this guide that is still under 250 grams once it is packed, and it is the one I would take on a walk where the drone is an afterthought rather than the point. You are giving up a great deal of camera and DJI caps you at 60 metres of height in that mode, so know what you are buying. If you would rather not give the camera up, the HOVERAir X1 PROMAX is 323 g complete with a 48-megapixel sensor and raw files, and it has no controller to leave behind because none is made for it. I have not flown one. What you pay for that is sixteen minutes a battery, obstacle sensing that only looks backwards, and a battery in the box rated to −5 °C rather than −10. Everything else at that weight is in the sub-250g drone roundup.

The one I’d leave at home

The DJI Mavic 4 Pro — and I want to be careful here, because it is the best flying camera on this page and I am not pretending otherwise. If somebody is paying for the pictures, it is the one I would take.

But look at what hiking with it means. 2,147 grams of carried kit: the drone at 1,063 g, a 420 g controller, and spare batteries at 332 g each. That is more than two litres of water, before you have packed any water. It buys you 2.4 minutes of flight per hundred grams carried, which is less than half what the Mini 5 Pro gives you. And its C2 class mark means you need the A2 Certificate of Competence before you can legally fly it near anybody at all — so on a busy hill you are carrying two kilos you are not allowed to use.

Every argument for it is a studio argument. Sensor size, dynamic range, an aperture that actually moves. Every one of them is real and not one of them survives contact with hour six of a twelve-mile day. If you already own one, take it somewhere you can park near.

And if what you actually want is one great aerial photograph of a specific place rather than a new hobby, owning is usually the expensive way round. You can hire a qualified drone pilot who already has the drone, the qualifications and the insurance — and there is a drone photography service for exactly that.