OK - in the interests of pushing this wonderful aircraft decided to fly it in the most windy conditions...
Up on a mountain with no tree cover... wind speeds of 20 mph with gusts of 40 mph. Flat and no shelter. Ideal place to see what this little UAV can take... 'Fly it like you stole it'
You can hear the props whirring at full blast - that is not the phantom powered up. It is switched off - it was the wind spinning up the props when I was holding it against the wind!! Listen carefully and it sounded like it was in flight.
The Phantom3 flew well under the conditions. Against the wind it flew at 4-5mph at full throttle.. downwind it flew around 34mph with no forward throttle. You can see that motorbike screaming at about 100mph on the road... yet it filmed it pretty steady in one place.
Anyway did a couple of gentle circuits and then decided to go further towards what looked like a 'slip stream' ahead (the green bit of grass) - bad idea... the phantom just flew backwards at over 40 mph with no stick input within a matter of seconds.
This is at the 4:00 mark. I was simply stationary and hovering on the spot when I could see the phantom flying backwards.
It felt like a 'flyaway' - I could not stop the phantom even with full throttle forwards. Let go off the sticks and it carried on backwards...
bye bye phantom...I could also see that the phantom was not tilting against the wind or making any attempt to stop and hold it's position when my hands were off the sticks. I decided to Rapidly descend to get out of the wind currents and then did a rapid landing before things got more nasty. So I still had control to descend and it slowed down when I lose height - "
it just felt like no control rolling backwards down a hill with the handbrake off in a car..."
In hindsight I could have activated auto land but considering I had about 3 seconds to think before the phantom disappeared over the ridge at about 40mph I decided to land asap and cut my losses. After a 10 minute hike up the mountain we retrieved the phantom with just a bit of mud on one of the props.. No damage at all. In fact DJI pilot guided me towards the aircraft which made things easier. You can see how windy it was up at the landing site when I hovered it again.
Love the P3 - while I would not recommend flying in this sort of conditions it is a tough little aircraft nevertheless. I am still not sure why the Phantom just 'flew away' so quickly - I can only assume that the gust of wind was so strong it just overwhelmed the P3 flight controller and just blew with the wind...
Video to follow after youtube sucks it in..