Tree landing and takeoff

[Slackware]

Well, emergency battery rth got me. power line, or tree choice. Kept tapping cancel when I dared look down as I my drones life flashed before my eyes. Landed in tree 52.5 feet up, only 10 ft from home. Decided to try hanging sideways takeoff since cutting tree down would not be pretty for drone. Little wiggling and i'm free..., but no lift.......
Looks like 21.5 mph landing speed. -42.6 ft height. 0 sec flight time. So Newton said I had not only no lift, but added acceleration.
Battery bounced out. Camera feed still works. Gimbal moves, no cracks.
One shock mount popped out of top frame, and was just squished between frame mounts.
Lifted off 4 inches and landed again.
Mac is mad at me so can't pull the tree landing yet. But I need to buy a lottery ticket fast.

 

[Robert P Stenerson PLS]

Anyone new drone pilot who thinks they'll never crash is in for a rude awakening. A couple months back I busted my cherry by driving my P4 into some tree tops. I was running a small photogrammetry grid flight using Pix4D Capture. I had two great flights beforehand, and wanted to get one more in the can before losing daylight and I moved to another location, but hadn't done my homework first, I.e. I didn't check topo elevations for the whole flight. I was just using the Google Earth satellite view in the app, planned the size of the grid set it for flying 150 AGL. I hadn't taken into account a small 50ft hill (with 90-120 trees) in the SE corner of the flight path grid. It was with a sick feeling [emoji47] and panic as I watched the little aircraft indicator frozen in position and beeping instead of the shutter clicking sound every three seconds. Luckily, I was able to retrieve the damaged P4, as well as find the battery pack which had separated during the fall. If I had simply pulled up my OnXmap Hunt app with contours turned on before the flight I would have seen the rise in that corner, and could have reset my mission flight AGL to something to make clearance.

Yep, it stung, but I learned. Hopefully, you did as well, and it'll be a mistake you won't make again. If you never make a mistake, then you aren't trying.

All the best, and safe landings,



Sent from my SHIELD Tablet K1 using PhantomPilots mobile app

 

[Slackware]

UPDATE:
After a miserable week of rain and wind. Flew it today. No problems, gimbal works fine. Drone :1 - tree : zero.

Question. inside the battery compartment on side opposite connector there is a plastic plate glued. Mine is sort of twisted back away from top front edge of compartment..
Is it supposed to be flat up on side? Don't see any cracks, and it is stiff so don't want to force it. battery did bounce out of drone on impact. Was weird seeing battery on ground and light still going on drone.

 

[Dal]

UPDATE:
After a miserable week of rain and wind. Flew it today. No problems, gimbal works fine. Drone :1 - tree : zero.

Question. inside the battery compartment on side opposite connector there is a plastic plate glued. Mine is sort of twisted back away from top front edge of compartment..
Is it supposed to be flat up on side? Don't see any cracks, and it is stiff so don't want to force it. battery did bounce out of drone on impact. Was weird seeing battery on ground and light still going on drone.

There should be another one across from it. And those are your antennas


Sent from my iPhone using PhantomPilots