Thank you!

[tkurtz]

Just wanted to give a shout out to this forum and its members. Over the weekend I was flying in the darkish hours and received a compass calibration error after about 60 seconds. Thanks to my reading up and watching videos on the subject I just kept my cool, rotated her until I was confident in her orientation and calmly fly her back and landed no problem.

I had driven about 75 miles from my last good compass calibration but had no good place to recalibrate due to known underground infrastructure, etc so felt it riskier to recalibrate then to go with my last good calibration Albeit from a distance away.

I should've known something was amiss because when I took off and hovered at 15 feet it took control input to keep her in place. When reviewing my flight map post flight all the flight paths were curved instead of more straight lines. I'll now know to land immediately after doing my takeoff and hold at 15' if she doesn't hold position and I'm not comfortable in the conditions flying in Atti.

I practiced more Atti flying the next day in better conditions.

Great experience that ended well thanks to the wealth of knowledge shared on this forum.

Thank You All!!!

Oh, the video turned out really well without the bird holding position. It seriously had nice flow. As I get better flying in Atti I'll remember the nice effect it can have on the videography.

 

[Meta4]

Just wanted to give a shout out to this forum and its members. Over the weekend I was flying in the darkish hours and received a compass calibration error after about 60 seconds.

I had driven about 75 miles from my last good compass calibration but had no good place to recalibrate due to known underground infrastructure, etc so felt it riskier to recalibrate then to go with my last good calibration Albeit from a distance away.

I should've known something was amiss because when I took off and hovered at 15 feet it took control input to keep her in place. When reviewing my flight map post flight all the flight paths were curved instead of more straight lines. I'll now know to land immediately after doing my takeoff and hold at 15' if she doesn't hold position and I'm not comfortable in the conditions flying in Atti.

Your compass error wasn't saying there was a problem with your compass calibration.
It was warning you that the compass sensed a problem with the local magnetic environment ... what it detected was significantly different from what it was calibrated for.
This was due to the magnetic influence of the underground infrastructure you mentioned.
Curved flight lines is always a giveaway telling you that the compass is trying to deal with a spurious magnetic influence.
Being 75 miles from your last calibration point is quite OK and would have been no problem at all and definitely very much safer than calibrating your compass close to the magnetic influence of a lot of steel.

 

[tkurtz]

And the learning continues Thanks for the reply!