Drone-fishing buyers who have spent the last six months arguing about Aeroo Pro reliability now have a long-form, gloves-off review from someone who flew the drone professionally for two seasons and has just resigned the contract.
"This is probably one of the toughest videos I'm ever probably going to produce or have produced," On Point Adventures said at the top of the 17-minute farewell. "And that is around me leaving Team Aeroo. Which was a huge decision. But what that brings for you is now I can give you a completely unbiased, gloves-off perspective of Aeroo and what the company was really, really like to deal with."
On build quality, the verdict was generous. "My personal opinion is these are a sub-$2,000 drone," he said. "What I can say about the overall build quality of these drones for the price you pay is pretty bloody good. We're talking a drone that can carry kilo payloads, can fly in 50km/h winds. This particular drone has been dropped. It has flown into lines. It has been toppled off the top of tables on the beach. It has snapped propellers. I have really probably put this drone through more than what it should have been. And yet, it still starts up and flies exactly as it should."
The one persistent design weakness was the gimbal. "There was a bit too much tolerance, in my opinion, for where I fish," he said. "The sand is exceptionally fine and it gets into everything, which has jammed up my gimbal on several occasions, but that's been fixed with giving it a quick brush."
DJI got the most useful comparison in the video. "In terms of flying this next to my Mavic Pro, as well as my Phantom that I've had, this eats them for breakfast," he said. "The quality of it is on par, but where I think the DJI did exceed and excel over this was certainly the return to home. These drones, if you want something that's going to land on a dime, they're not going to do it. They're 2 to 3 metres off every time. DJIs will land on a 50 cent piece. These will not. However, everything else, these will actually do better."
The customer-service section was the strongest endorsement of the company. He addressed the social-media chorus of complaints directly. "In my time dealing with Aeroo, I started to get a bit nervous when I'd watch the Aeroo Facebook page and I'd see all these people complaining about 'I can't get tech support'. So I wanted to see firsthand whether or not this was true." His test, in the form of a 10-person case study made up of mates who bought the drone, was decisive. "It was so lightning fast and so professional, the replies that it gave me a fantastic piece of mind as a pro angler that everything was getting done correctly."
The most newsworthy part of the video, though, is why he is leaving — and one of the two reasons is policy. "Where I live, it is absolutely no secret that we cop terrible weather a lot of the time," he said. "And our beautiful government over here in Western Australia has introduced a demersal ban, which means we cannot chase Jew fish, snapper, baldchin, black ass etc. off the boat. So we are now land-based only for those species. What that means is I need to also now have the facilities of a waterproof drone. So I can fly in light rain, I can fly in heavy rain, I can fly it when I need to without risking damaging it. And that wouldn't be very fair on the Aeroo brand if I was flying another product when they put so much time and effort into me."
The other reason was simple audience economics. "I didn't feel that my audience really wanted to watch too much drone content," he said. "There's other content creators out there that truly deserve an Aeroo endorsement more than me."
The sign-off was sincere. "I've never been that selfish individual that would hold on to something as tight as I could, knowing full well that I can't represent what I need to do to its full potential."
For angler-fishing readers shopping a heavy-lift fishing drone, the takeaway is layered. The Aeroo Pro reads on this independent review as a good-value heavy-lift drone with a soft gimbal in fine sand and a return-to-home you should never trust to a 50-cent landing — and a customer-service team that, by every test he could devise, actually answers. For the broader WA fishing scene, the same video is a small case study in how a single state-government policy is now reshaping the gear conversations of pro anglers who have to fish, increasingly, when the weather decides rather than when they do.