Interactive Toy Firefly R/C Radio Controlled Helicopter

 (13 customer reviews)

I bought this for my 16 year old son. I had bought an r/c helicopter before, but we could never seem to get it to perform, and it was big so only for outside. Since he has had this little guy, he has had a lot of flying time and a lot of fun. It took a couple of days to get the hang of controlling it, and fiddling with the collective on-the-fly, but it has been a great success.
It is lightweight and more resilient than you might think, I have to say, it took a lot of battering when he was first learning. Note: after you crash, make sure the gears are lined up before taking off again:-). The replacement part kit is nearly as expensive as the plane itself. ugh! On the positive side, a little tape works fine for repairing the rotors, and we just had to do that last week, so he has had it for 2 months of learning before actually breaking the thin plastic. (Actually, his 18 year old brother came home from college and was trying to learn how to fly it...)

We bought an...Read more

I recently purchased this helicopter and found it to be very fun to fly out of the box. The problem is its fragility. The blades were broken after the third flight. I read previous reviews of the Micro Mosquito sister helicopter that warned of issues with durability so I was very careful with each flight. Never the less, the rotor blades are so fragile I don't think it's possible to use the product without destroying them. Replacement rotors are available, but they are quite expensive and must be an excellent profit center for Interactive toys. Keeping the blades light is an excellent approach for achieving the power density that makes this toy possible, but there has to be a better more durable material than the excessively thin plastic that Interactive toys has chosen. SUMMARY: Fun toy...but consider the cost of regular replacement parts before you purchase.

The Draganfly Firefly indoor R/C helicopter is a fun, but delicate, toy. While learning to fly it, I crashed it numerous times (mainly into houseplants). This quickly destroyed the delicate blades beyond the point where Scotch tape could fix them. After retrofitting the helicopter with a set of (very) expensive replacement blades, it became highly unstable, spinning uncontrollably into the ground no matter what I did. The problem turned out to be the locking mechanism that holds the rotor shaft to the underside of the helicopter body. There is a locking pin, which looks like a little wrench, followed by a tiny washer, then finally a cap which is simply pushed onto the end of the shaft. When I pulled off the piece of rubber tubing from the top of the rotor shaft to remove the blades, the bottom cap was loosened ever so slightly. This allowed the shaft to wobble during flight, which slowed down the upper blades which are directly connected to the shaft (the lower blades rotate freely...Read more