PhantomFan said:
"My principle beef with the Phantom is its ability to fly in any meaningful wind is pretty much ZILCH. It is just too small and light. A craft in the 550 or 600mm motor to motor range provides more stability and opportunity to fly. "
PF
I'm surprised to hear you have difficulty with flying your Phantom in "meaningful" wind...I live on the Canadian prairies, in an area notorious for near constant winds, and although I draw the line in the 18-20mph range, I can count on one hand the number of times I've ever flown with it below about 10mph. I have been often impressed at how well this small quad flies in wind; I've flown a variety of heli's for more than a decade, and my first venture into quads was a Gaui 500X. The Gaui does no better than the Phantom in windy conditions (meaning it handles wind surprisingly well)
I'm in the same boat as you in that I've not had a lick of trouble with either of my Phantoms. I have two; one with a zen muse on it and a Gaui FPV system with a monitor, mainly for framing shots. My second system is set up for FPV, with a 5.8ghz fat shark system, iOSD, BT datalink and ground station system. Both have more than 100 flights on them, and neither have glitches in any way, ever.
I think that as others have pointed out, there is no one, single cause for these glitches. Personally, I question whether the Phantom really has an appreciably higher number of fly-aways than another multi may have; people being people, we seldom comment much, especially online, about things that work the way we expect them to. We are however VERY quick to point out problems, real or imagined.
Given that, and the sheer number of Phantoms that have been sold in the last...what...year? 18 months?...certainly far more than any other multi in the same period, I wonder if we simply hear more about fly-aways with Phantoms because of the sheer volume of Phantoms out there flying. I think it's also worth acknowledging the reality that MANY Phantom pilots are not only new to R/C flying, they're new to R/C. Where it's still quite uncommon to hear of someone with no previous R/C flying experience buying a collective pitch helicopter, it's more the norm than the exception to hear about someone with no experience at all buying a Phantom to further explore another hobby, usually photography or videography.
With a decade of R/C/ heli flying under my belt, 25 years as a pilot of "big" aircraft (ones you actually sit in), 30 years of R/C experience and a 40 year career in aviation, I know I generally spend/spent at least an hour of tinkering/adjusting/balancing/repairing SOMETHING, or many "somethings" for every hour I spent flying. It's just the nature of the beast.
With an aircraft as sophisticated as the Phantom is, I'm sometimes surprised it's as relatively trouble free as it is. I don't believe I just "got lucky" with my Phantoms...only one of mine was purchased new. The other I bought used. I do think that at least a part of the reason I have had no issues is that I do the exact same things every single time I fly, and I do many of the same things after flying, every single time.
I know from my years of flying big airplanes that checklists are critically important for the same reasons as they are with small ones; verification of equipment viability and safety of flight operations. I also know that even when I started flying, my memory wasn't good enough to remember everything I needed to check, so I had a checklist written out that I could use every time. I do the same thing with my heli's and with my Phantoms.
A lot of those things are pretty simple, common sense things; checking all of the nuts, bolts, screws, tape, velcro, etc. to make sure it's the way it's supposed to be. When I say I "Check it", I don't mean I look at everything, and as long as it all looks good, it must BE good...I CHECK it...it doesn't take 5 minutes to check every screw, nut & bolt on the entire machine with the appropriate tool. Every time I open the hull ( no set schedule, but often every week or two for one reason or another) I always check each connection. Again...5 minutes max.
Some of them are less common sense but equally important, maybe more so when we're talking about fly-aways. Do you check for wifi signals in your immediate area? Is the wifi on your GoPro turned off? What about bluetooth? Your cellphone has both too, how about those? are you flying in an open field, or in your back yard? is your wifi operating normally in your house? how about your neighbours? There are free wifi scanner apps for your smartphone...you'd be surprised at how much contamination there is out there, a lot of which can potentially affect your Phantom.
Are you near any above ground high voltage power lines? What about old telephone lines? Even though fibre optics are the standard for telephone service delivery on land lines now, there are still old lines still providing service for a variety of telecommunications equipment, all over the world. Thinking about your environment is just as important to trouble free flight operations as mechanical issues, especially as these systems increase in complexity.
Is that all there is to ending the fly away "problems"? Not hardly...that would be way too easy. I do think though that there is a significant number of fly-aways that could have been prevented or avoided. Without a doubt, there are problems that originate in the hardware or firmware that DJI needs to address. They've also done a pretty poor job in addressing some past problems, and they have a long way to go before their communications with customers even hit the "adequate" level. If they do a better job of addressing the things they can fix, and we as the end users do a better job of making sure we address things in our control, I'd suspect we'd hear a lot less about fly aways than we do now