Date: 2006-12-26  Reviewed by: Shane McGlaun  Manufacturer: Draganfly Innovations

Visually, the Firefly is designed to look like a bug. The two glowing red LED eyes on front and the underside of the device is ribbed like a bug. The Firefly is quite a bit larger than the Picco Z, but the Firefly is still sized well for indoor flight. No tail rotor is used in the Firefly design; rather it uses twin counter rotating rotors to provide a stabile flight.

To make the rotor blades more durable they are surrounded by circular wire. This wire also makes the Firefly easier to fly because when you bang into walls the rotors can still spin. Much like the Picco Z, you can control the Firefly with the included transmitter that has functions for left, right and up and down.

The Firefly remote also has a trim wheel to allow you to trim the helicopter for stabile forward flight. The knob method of trimming the copter is much easier to do than the push button method the Picco Z uses. The Firefly is also slightly easier to fly than the Picco Z, at least on my review units; I found it easier to maintain a hover with the Firefly.

Charging the Firefly is done via the controller and a small charge cable that comes out of the rear of the controller and plugs into the Firefly right between the red LED eyes. However, unlike the Picco Z that recharges solely from the transmitters batteries, the Firefly requires an AC adapter to be plugged into the wall and to the transmitter to charge the battery on the helicopter. On a toy destined to be played with indoors this isn’t such a big deal, other than the fact that if you take it with you anywhere you have to remember the AC adapter too, whereas the Picco Z only requires you to take the transmitter along.

The only real issues I had with the performance of the Firefly centered on the dual rotor propulsion. With the Picco Z I could spin the helicopter as much as I wanted with right or left control input without upsetting the copter. However with the Firefly if I spun it too quickly or for too long the dual rotors would wobble and touch each other. This caused the firefly to spin in uncontrollable arcs and eventually crash. Thankfully the Firefly is very durable so no matter how many times I crashed it just kept working.

I did find on my test units that I could fly the Firefly more accurately than I could my Picco Z units. I was able to trim the Firefly more accurately, which helped flight characteristics as well. With the Firefly I could land on smaller surfaces and fly thought more obstacles than I was able to do with the Picco Z. Flight time is about 20 minutes per charge and a full charge takes about 30 minutes to complete.

The Firefly is a blast to play with. It has perhaps a bit more of a learning curve than the Picco Z, but on the whole the two copters are very similar flight wise. If accuracy in flight is your goal the Firefly is fantastic and very easy to fly and it is also well built and very durable. Price wise the Firefly is more expensive than the Picco Z at $79 to $99.

True micro rc helicopters are widely available nowadays, a long time after micro cars, boats and planes became popular.

This is because model helicopter technology is far more complicated than any other rc vehicle or aircraft technology, and so it took much longer for appropriate components to become small enough and cheap enough to allow mass-production of true micro rc helicopters.

By far the cheapest micro helis on sale now are not, in fact, radio control in the true sense of the term, but are controlled by infra-red technology, in much the same way that your TV or DVD player remote operates.

The Silverlit Picoo Z was the first of these to appear late in 2006, getting in to the record books for the world’s smallest ‘rc’ helicopter! The Picoo Z is now marketed as the Havoc Heli and still sells in huge numbers even though many manufacturers have since jumped on the bandwagon and followed suit.

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