YIKES Crazy driver.Last Saturday was a beautiful day at the beach with the family, along with the family the bird came with me to enjoy video over the ocean waters of the Pacific. Weather conditions were clear blue skies with winds around 8MPH.
As the day went by I sat with my tablet to program my mission in Autopilot, when I was comfortable with the mission I launched the bird in Autopilot. Total time for the mission was around 15 minutes and 10 seconds, for some reason I felt comfortable with this.
The last point of the mission was for the bird to go out 1,500 feet in the ocean and pick up an altitude of about 175 feet to create a nice video effect with the camera pointed to where I was sitting with the RC. On the last leg of the mission my battery was almost down to about 25%, I started to panic. The bird was far out in the ocean and thought that I was not going to have enough juice to make it back.
I immediately took manual control of the bird by switching from F mode to P mode and started to fly the bird back home manually. I was flying in the same direction of the wind, which helped quite a bit. I remember reading the speed in the App and I must have been doing about 27mph.
I looked down to my battery level and saw that was getting close to "critical", my throat dried up. I started to think that once the battery reaches critical level the bird is going to auto land in the water. My thumb was pushing the lever to the forward position to make the bird come back to me as fast as possible. I finally see the bird getting close to me, I started feeling much better.
Finally when the bird was very close to the shore I released the throttle to slow down but the wind was pushing the bird and it made the bird slide about another 10 feet in the forward direction, not sure if it was so much the wind but at the rate of speed I was traveling. The bird almost, almost hit parked cars and power lines. That would have been the end for my AC, perhaps after hitting a sign and parked cars the bird would have landed in a busy highway and possibly get run over by a car, such a high traffic highway.
I guess what I learned from the experience is:
1- Not cut myself so short on a windy day.
2- The bird needs stopping distance.
I have been thinking this whole time that I had left my thumb in the lever for another second this story would have ended in a crash.She is fine but I learned a good lesson.
I hope this helps the rest of the phantom pilots in this forum.
Oh I was shooting video the whole time. So here is a link:
NoCo Drones
