Flight Replay

Viewing a Flight Replay

To view a flight replay, open a Flight record and click the View in Replay button. The elements shown vary by drone model, but a replay typically includes the flight path, control stick positions, and an attitude indicator.

Moving the camera

The camera is not locked to the drone. You can pan, translate, zoom, tilt, and orbit freely while a flight is playing. Click and drag anywhere on the map to translate the view — the drone will continue tracking through the scene relative to your new position. Use this to line up a specific angle, look ahead along the flight path, or hold a view on a particular area of the ground while playback continues.

• Right-click to pan the camera
• Left-click to orbit the camera
• Use a scroll wheel to zoom the camera

Viewing alerts during replay

Any alert that fired on the pilot's controller during the flight (for example, low battery, GPS signal loss, or a geofence warning) appears in three places:

• On the flight path: a marker is placed at the exact position where the drone was when the alert was triggered. Info alerts show as blue circles; warning and critical alerts show as yellow or red triangles. Click a marker to view the full alert message.
• On the timeline: colored ticks on both the main timeline and the overview bar show when each alert occurred.
• As an on-screen pop-up message: when the playback reaches an alert, a pop-up message slides in at the bottom-right of the screen with the alert message, color-coded by severity. Pop-up messages dismiss automatically after a few seconds, or you can click one to dismiss it immediately.

Showing and hiding scene layers

Use the layer panel to control what's visible in the 3D scene. You can show or hide each of the following independently:

• Flight Path
• Drone
• Sensor Footprint
• Alerts
• Pilot Position
• Camera Target

Hide any layers you don't need, or isolate a single layer to focus on it.

Map imagery and terrain

Base map tiles and terrain elevation are provided by Esri. The scene renders on actual terrain, so hills, valleys, and elevation changes along the flight path are represented in 3D.

Flight path display

The flight path renders as a bold line with a dark outline, so it stays visible from any camera angle, including when it passes behind terrain or when the camera is close to ground level.

You can color the flight path using several modes, including one that shows the estimated remaining battery percentage at each point in the flight. In this mode, the path shows green while the battery is healthy and transitions to yellow, orange, and red as it depletes, making it easy to see where battery levels became a concern during the flight.

Sensor Footprint and Camera Target

The sensor footprint — the translucent pyramid extending from the drone — reflects the gimbal orientation recorded in the flight log, combined with an estimated camera field of view calculated from the sensor's focal length, sensor dimensions, and optical zoom level. As the drone yaws and the gimbal pitches, the footprint moves across the ground to match.

The Camera Target — the crosshairs visible on the map — reflects the approximate center point of the camera, which is taken from the DroneSense Pilot app Sensor Point of Interest data.

Drone orientation

The 3D drone model pitches, rolls, and yaws according to the attitude data recorded in the flight log — for example, banking into a turn or nosing down during a descent — so the model in the scene reflects how the aircraft was actually flying at each moment.

Using the timeline

Zoom into the timeline to inspect a shorter window of the flight in more detail. When you zoom in, an overview bar appears above the main timeline showing the full flight, with a highlighted section marking the portion currently visible below. Camera captures and alerts appear as markers on both bars. Click anywhere on the overview bar to jump the visible window to that point in time.

Playback speed

The available playback speeds are:

-3x, -2x, -1.5x, -1x, -0.75x, -0.5x, -0.25x, 0x, 0.25x, 0.5x, 0.75x, 1x, 1.5x, 2x, 3x

Use the fractional speeds (0.25x, 0.5x, 0.75x, 1.5x) to step through a specific moment more slowly, in either direction.