I Guess it's so long for now fellow P3 pilots. Yesterday brought an end to over 2 years of successful flights with my P3A.
I took off with no wind and a full battery after performing a thorough pre-flight check. I was running Litchi on iOS.
I manually took it up to altitude and everything was normal as I began the WP mission. It lifted another 20ft to 240ft at which point it zoomed around, completely inverted and powered into a neighbor's roof upside-down. (Poor neighbor thought a bomb had gone off!) Total wreck obviously, except for the landing gear which never made contact. It was easily recovered on the hillside after bouncing of their concrete shingle roof.
Factoids:
1. No evidence of a bird strike. I watched it with my naked eyes - also video and no visible feathers.
2. Did not spin off a prop. They were still on the drone, but scratched and broken from the roof.
3. Same mission I ran previously.
4. No wind – not that wind would cause it to invert and power 150ft down to a roof top.
5. I was watching the app until I heard the commotion in the air, at which point I watched it flip and dive straight down.
6. The camera was trying to keep things steady you’ll see, but the final second or two were lost when the battery ejected upon impact.
I don’t know – IMU error – gyro? I’ll probably try to recover the onboard logs, but the flight battery is pretty bad and it won’t recognize my other battery for some reason.
Plans:
Guess I’ll wait it out awhile and see what develops with laws and technology before jumping into another one. I did get a Mavic as a gift from my Better Half last month, but returned it when I found the video didn’t perform right with my iPad Mini. I’m very concerned for liability reasons now – who knows how this could have ended. And my insurance specifically excludes drones.
I took off with no wind and a full battery after performing a thorough pre-flight check. I was running Litchi on iOS.
I manually took it up to altitude and everything was normal as I began the WP mission. It lifted another 20ft to 240ft at which point it zoomed around, completely inverted and powered into a neighbor's roof upside-down. (Poor neighbor thought a bomb had gone off!) Total wreck obviously, except for the landing gear which never made contact. It was easily recovered on the hillside after bouncing of their concrete shingle roof.
Factoids:
1. No evidence of a bird strike. I watched it with my naked eyes - also video and no visible feathers.
2. Did not spin off a prop. They were still on the drone, but scratched and broken from the roof.
3. Same mission I ran previously.
4. No wind – not that wind would cause it to invert and power 150ft down to a roof top.
5. I was watching the app until I heard the commotion in the air, at which point I watched it flip and dive straight down.
6. The camera was trying to keep things steady you’ll see, but the final second or two were lost when the battery ejected upon impact.
I don’t know – IMU error – gyro? I’ll probably try to recover the onboard logs, but the flight battery is pretty bad and it won’t recognize my other battery for some reason.
Plans:
Guess I’ll wait it out awhile and see what develops with laws and technology before jumping into another one. I did get a Mavic as a gift from my Better Half last month, but returned it when I found the video didn’t perform right with my iPad Mini. I’m very concerned for liability reasons now – who knows how this could have ended. And my insurance specifically excludes drones.