The props are hard to hurt. You are more liable to get it stuck in a tree than to break a prop. Bright Colors worked for me. The top is always facing me when I bank, as I tend to fly in a pattern that I am in the middle of. You will see how tough this thing is.
Have fun with your Mini Me.
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I ate a bunch of props as I learned to fly my Hubsan x4 drone - no prop guards - but the props were pretty cheap. I think I bought a bag of 20 for $5? Once I got the hang of the controls, I rarely bumped a prop and and have made the last handful of spares last for quite a while.
My biggest regret for my drone was the camera - I went with a cheap drone and got upsold the $10 to get the basic camera. The video is out of focus, grainy, and the field of view is tiny. Every few seconds the video drops a bunch of frames, I assume because the motors are sucking electrons and the camera can’t generate images.
Without the good video, it just becomes a tedious exercise of circling trees in our yard, chasing the neighborhood kids down the street, or seeing how precisely I can land it on stuff.
My next drone will have stabilized video on a gimbal mount, GPS, and open-source software so I can muck with the navigation and guidance.
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I am late to this party, but I got in on this kickstarter for me and the little one:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1818505613/airblock-the-modular-and-programmable-starter-dron
Will report how it is when it delivers.
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Gonna have to save up for this one:
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Wow. They should name it Deathtrap.
This was not Kai…fast forward to the last minute for the exciting part…LOL…
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And the award for biggest idiot goes too… Just 2 feet higher and he could have smashed it into the face of one of those workers…
Yeah…and the worst thing for him is that since this is such a high visibility event…and it has been such a fear in the news and stuff, they are probably going to make an example of him. I will say though, I’m impressed with the quality of that footage… 
It does look gorgeous! I thought this was an accident during some sort of promo shot but then I noticed the oblivious workers on the tower and jerky control.
Yeah…it kind of looks like it went into automatic “return to home” mode or something and just flew line of sight to that point or something similar. I know some of the more advanced drones do that when they lose the signal from their base unit…they are pre-programmed to return to their launch point or something. Maybe that is what happened here.
Most that have a return to home function have an altitude setting that commands the drone to climb before moving on a course for home. DJIs come set pretty low, like 33 meters above takeoff altitude (AGL). The first thing that I do when programming one is to double that. There are a lot of trees taller than 100 ft around Atlanta, which is conducive to getting oneself added to a drone fail video.
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BeachAV8R
I’m tickled you are enjoying the X5C. Myself, I wanted a thousand dollar Phantom. However, I thought “I will wreck it in a week” Common sense prevailed and I believe, if you can fly the X5 with no automated systems, then you can learn to fly anything. I hope I am right. I fly the hell out of mine.
Enjoy brother.
My fear of heights seriously took hold watching that video. I was sitting here gripping my desk and feeling week in the knees and seeing those guys OUTSIDE the safety railing just about did me in. 
Wheels
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I vote also for Hubsan X4 I bought itnd that taught me a lot it had all the very basics of GPS and atti and headless for the nervous plus basic 720 camera range was 300 metres so gave me some confidence building, fought and lost in the winds many times so it taught me how to guage winds and when i crashed it and had one severe fly away it taught me how not to panic, gave me confidence in trying new features and it saved me from experimenting with a brand new 1000 pound drone.
The funny thing is, once you learn on the cheaper model (that has fewer bells and whistles), the expensive drone is a far simpler device to fly. My little Hubsan required you to constantly provide control inputs to keep it parked where you wanted it. When I purchased my Phantom 3 it was amazing to me how stable it was with my hands off the controls.
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Not really for a kid, well at least my kids, but I had the opportunity to fly my friend’s DJI Mavik Pro last weekend. I flew it both LOS and FPV(iPhone 7 Plus) and came away very impressed with the handling and video for its diminutive size. I had my Phantom 3 Pro along for comparison.
BTW, if you have a Phantom 3 Pro with the HDMI board in the controller, connecting to a set of Fat Shark HD4 goggles via HDMI gives really awesome results. There is a slight bit of latency, probably less than a second, so not good enough for close proximity FPV or racing. But the image quality and HUD overlay are excellent. Highly recommend this combination with the Phantom 3.
Phantom 4 owners will want the DJI goggles with built-in head tracker. My brother has a set of these on order for his Mavik Pro.
Friend Charles trying to avoid my Phantom while I am “under the hood” as he navigates his new Mavik Pro LOS in fading light.
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Now that the 4 is out, you might be able to pick up a DJI Phantom 3 for a little less money. They’re fairly simple to operate and you have to work at it to crash one.
Smells like spam to me.
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After reading your article I was amazed. Most toy drones are recommended for ages 8 and up, however, it is the parents’ discretion to determine what is the best age for their child to start learning how to fly a drone. I know that you explain it very well and I hope that other readers will also experience how I feel after reading your article.